While listening to Sir Thomas Mallory’s The Death of Arthur, I remember hearing mention of bachelors and butlers. Surely these aren’t the same bachelors and butlers we find in P. G. Wodehouse? How did this happen? Did a bachelor once wear metal and iron put on him by a butler? Mallory has written: “When Lucas the butler saw Griflet so lie, he horsed him again anon, and the two did marvelous deeds of arms with many bachelors.”
The Death of Arthur
I’m not sure I can picture Bertie Wooster and Jeeves doing this. “Very good, sir. I shall endeavour to shine your rapier, burnish your frockcoat and horse you before the tea things are put away.”
About the word “awesome.” We can picture Bertie Wooster using “awful” in a degraded way. “Awfully good of you, Aunt Agatha.” In the 1940’s, during Jeeves and Bertie’s “hayday, heyday,” CS Lewis mentioned, without seeming regret, the degrading of the word “awful” in the third book of his space trilogy, That Hideous Strength. Really, I can’t picture Bertie or Jeeves using awesome in this way. “Awesomely good of you, Aunt Agatha.” I was in my mid-thirties (early 1980s) when I first heard awesome used in degraded fashion.
Until then, as a creative writer, I was glad to hold that word in my arsenal to capture readers' imaginations. And used it sparingly—much as I picture my writing forerunners holding terrible for a closely related purpose. I’ve read that awesome, gaining ironic significance, is coming to mean its total opposite: That’s an awesome book, potato salad, commander-in-chief—meaning, not so much. Forever after deprived of its power to move us in some powerful way. Dismissive, and dismissed. Maybe still potent as irony, but downward—the negative direction. Didn’t this happen to precious? But I can’t use that as example. It was smart people who turned precious ironic. People who aren’t intellectual still use precious as ... precious. “The precious blood of the lamb,” example.
Since we’ve touched briefly on That Hideous Strength ... let’s think for moment about C.S. Lewis’s “verbicide, the murder of a word.” In his Studies in Words introduction, he calls “awfully,” a victim of verbicide. (Pass that one through the spell-check. Another smart person changes the language.) To trace the word awe: Anglo-Saxon ege transmutes via Old Norse through Middle English; in its turn becoming modern English; now exchanging the g sound for that signified by w. With literacy’s popular increase, scholars began writing the standards, and compiling dictionaries tracing the changes. Coupled with schooling and peer pressure, these kept a language firm in the tongue, categorically meaningful in the head. Today? Verbicide ongoing—OMG!
© S. Dorman 2024