Would older generations have recognised the words we speak today?
Click start to play today’s Spell It, where you can spot “oblivious”, which inspires this trip down an etymological route.
Living languages are constantly adding new words and meanings to existing ones. Sometimes, they’ll even discard old meanings and create whole new consequences for words. According to Dictionary.com, this can even happen by mistake.
The word “fruition” for instance, once meant “the pleasurable use or possession of something”. But because of the word “fruit” within it, people mistakenly began using it to refer to “bearing fruit” in the 19th century. As time went on, its original meaning completely went out of common usage.
In other cases, like “oblivion” in today’s Word Search, the change occurred through a more gradual process, where the original meaning was slowly forgotten – apt, considering how we use the word today!
“Oblivious” originally meant “lacking active conscious knowledge or awareness” and was first used in the mid-19th century. Although the word’s connotation of forgetfulness still remains, it has lost the sense meaning “unaware”. In the poem Persephone Abducted, American Poet Rita Dove grants a rare display of the word’s initial meaning: “She left us singing in the field, oblivious/ to all but the ache of our own bent backs.”
Another word that shares the same root of “oblivious” was used generously in the Harry Potter series by British writer J. K. Rowling. The “obliviate” spell caused the partial or complete erasure of memory – apt, for its meaning is simply “to forget”.
Which words do you know of that don’t mean what they used to? Play today’s Spell It and tell us at games@gulfnews.com.
