How Words Change Meaning

About this poem

As a poet, I am ever sensitive to the function and use of words, their derivations, their phonetic compilations, their phonological contrastive relationships, and their multilingual ranges and features. As a Freshman undergraduate student at Howard University in Washington, D.C., during the 1960s, and expressing the joys of youthfulness, with its promises of hope, fulfillment, and success, I composed a poem about the joy and gaiety of life (the title I don’t recall), experienced especially during one’s very young years when one is usually full of vim and vitality. This poem was later published in the school’s “Hilltop” newsletter. The year was 1960, at a time when the word “gay” (employed in my poem) meant (at least to me) simply “full of joy or mirth,” a meaning that most likely originated in the 12th century from the Old French word “gai” as well as from the Old High German “gahi” and suggesting such expressions as impulsiveness, being happy and carefree, spritely and bright, without having any meaning that referred to one’s sexuality. For me, the word preserved that meaning, and still retains that meaning today in a very personal way, although for some people, it may bear broader connotations. It appears that by the second half of the twentieth century, the Anglo-Germanic word “gay” began to increasingly shift its meaning, and to eventually arrive at its current modern day usage as a socially acceptable term for homosexual people. This is one tiny, yet significant example of semantic shift, and how, after a length of time, along with social and cultural changes on a global basis, words do alter their meaning, and along with such alterations, our social and cultural senses, in tandem, become altered. This one-stanza Japanese-style Tanka poem, “How Words Change Meaning,” serves as a syllogistic five-line statement that encapsulates the nature and processes of semantic shifts. more »