As I was moving boxes during the move, I ran across one labeled “unmentionables.” It caught my attention because that word struck me as rather old fashion. In our modern world, it seems, nothing is unmentionable. Watch any television program and even the commercials are filled graphic content. Last week, I walked into Wal-Mart and the first display as I came in was filled with a movie that had swear word in the title. It appears we have lost any semblance of what is appropriate and dignified. It reminds me of what was said by the prophet in Jeremiah 6:15 “Were they ashamed because of the abomination they have done? They were not even ashamed at all; They did not even know how to blush. Therefore they shall fall among those who fall; At the time that I punish them, They shall be cast down," says the LORD.” When a society gets to the point it can’t even be embarrassed because nothing is left unspoken, that society is ripe for a fall.
Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...
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