The Changing Lives of Words | Reflections
Gleaned from today’s Know Your English Column in The Hindu
3 November 2026 #newspaperinlearning
The “Know Your English” column is a popular weekly column in the pages of The Hindu that ardent and devoted readers of the newspaper would never fail to look out for!
The column, compiled by Prof. S. Upendran, a professor (now retired) at the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) in Hyderabad, answers readers’ genuine queries about word meanings, pronunciation, common idioms, phrasal verbs, and frequently confused expressions.
In today’s The Hindu, there were some of these gleanings from the archives.
A well-meaning reader had asked this question –
What is the difference between “friend” and “companion”? (S. Sateesh, Bangalore)
To which Prof. Upendran so aptly replies -
The meaning of the word “friend” has undergone several changes. I understand that during Shakespeare’s time the word was used to refer to one’s mistress! Nowadays, of course, the word “friend” is used to refer to someone whom you have known for some time and with whom you have a reasonably good relationship. The individual could be someone in whom you confide; a person to whom you tell your problems. In the case of a friend there is an emotional bonding, but there does not have to be physical proximity. You and your friend need not be together all the time.
A “companion”, on the other hand, is an ambiguous term. This individual could be like a friend in that he/she may be very close to you. For example, Dr. Watson was Holmes’ constant companion; he went wherever the great detective went.
They got along famously and they were good friends. The word “companion” can also be used to refer to someone who accompanies you on a journey. You may talk to him, share food with him, but once you get off the train/bus, you may never see him again.
While the word “friend” stresses the emotional bonding between individuals, “companion” stresses the physical presence of the individual being referred to,
says Prof. Upendran!
Well, this blogger would like to just add to the lovely reply provided by Prof. Upendran.
It’s from the book titled, An Outline History of the English Language by F. T. Wood.
On an aside, one thing that I so like about this book is that, it’s jargon-free, and hence makes a highly engaging read for all and sundry. Particular mention should be made about the fact that, Wood treats linguistic changes that impact the meaning of a particular word, as direct consequences of historical events (e.g., Norman Conquest or Renaissance humanism or Scandinavian settlements or imperial expansion).
In Chapter VII of the book titled, ‘Change of Meaning’, he explains the reasons how and why words undergo a change of meaning over time. (Now you know why Saussure prefers a synchronic over a diachronic study of language – wherein he sees language as a complete, self-contained system of interrelated signs at a specific point in time (ignoring historical changes) 😊
Says Wood –
One of the first things that the student of literature comes to realise, perhaps at first with a little surprise, is that many words have not always had the same meaning that they bear today.
He may, for instance, set himself to study a few plays of Shakespeare, and soon he learns that a fool, to Shakespeare, meant something different from what it means to us, that a battle could be used to signify not only a fight but also a company of soldiers (equivalent to our modern word battalion), that fond implied ‘foolish’ more often than ‘loving’, and that when a character says’ I’ll be with you presently ‘he does not mean soon, or later on, but immediately.
Countless words in the English language have changed or modified their meaning in this way; and it is quite natural that they should have done.
For words are not static, despite a very widespread belief to the contrary even amongst intelligent and educated people. No less a person than Dr. Johnson, when he first began to collect the material for his dictionary, supposed that they were and that he could fix them for all time; but before he had completed his task he had altered his mind.
Actually, of course, words have no independent and intrinsic meaning; they have, in fact, no meaning at all apart from that given them by the human mind and by their context; for they are essentially vehicles for the expression of thoughts and ideas on the one hand and for their evocation on the other.
That is why it is a fallacy, to which the academic mentality too often falls a victim, to suppose that a word can properly be used only in its ‘root’ or etymological sense.
Quite clearly, a particular word may evoke different ideas, or have different associations, for different persons or different ages.
Thus the word pipe means one thing to the smoker, another to the plumber and something else to the organ-builder, while the mention of the word plane will call up three distinct and widely divergent ideas in the minds of the geometrician, the carpenter and the aeronaut respectively.
In the same way when an Englishman in the early days of the manorial system heard the word villein he merely thought of a very lowly labourer; but two hundred years later it brought to mind primarily not the social position or the occupation of such a person but his uncouth manners and behaviour, and later still it suggested an evil-doer, possibly because of a curious human tendency to identify social respectability and ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour with moral integrity, and to look upon their opposites with suspicion.
1. Generalisation. A very frequent means by which a change of meaning occurs in a word is by the process which we may call generalisation; that is to say, a term which at one time had a specialised and restricted meaning comes, in course of time, to have a wider application.
A typical example here is the word box, today one of the commonest and most generalised of nouns in the English language.
Originally, however, it was the name of a tree and the wood from it. In Twelfth Night, it will be recalled, Sir Toby Belch and his cronies hide behind a box tree when they lie in wait to enjoy Malvolio’s discovery of the forged letter. Being rare and expensive, box wood was used almost exclusively for making small caskets for the reception of jewellery, which receptacle, became known, in its turn, as a box.
For many years, then, a box was always made of a particular kind of wood, after which it was named, and was of quite small dimensions.
Gradually, however, less insistence was laid on the material and more on the object, so that one could speak of a box of cedar wood, of oak or of walnut; but right up to the year 1700 or thereabouts the idea of smallness still attached to it. A bigger kind of receptacle was called a chest.
So already the process of generalisation had started. But since the eighteenth century it has gone much farther, with the result that today a box may be of any material (not only wood) and of any size. And we can even speak of a horse-box on the railway or a box at the theatre, while a verb to box (to put or to pack into boxes) has been coined.
Similarly with the words journey and journal. Both are derived from the French noun jour (day). The root meaning of journey is a day’s walk or ride, and of journal a daily record of events, and in the case of this latter the literal sense is still retained in the specialised use to denote (a) a diary, and (b) a book in which a business firm records its daily transactions. But for long now, in their more ordinary acceptation, both have lost this restricted meaning, so that we may speak, without any seeming incongruity, of ‘a journey of several weeks’ or of ‘a monthly journal’.
A similar extension or generalisation is to be seen in the two words companion and comrade. Literally the former means ‘one who eats bread with another person’ (Lat. con=with, panis=bread; cf. Fr. pain); just as the latter means ‘one who shares a room’ (It. camera=a room); but since those with whom we eat bread or share a room are likely to become our close friends for the time being, the inevitable shifting of emphasis took place and the modern signification of these words was evolved. In both cases, of course, the root meaning has been entirely lost and it will probably come as a revelation to most people to learn of it,
says Wood.
To conclude then, in the words of the ‘Great Dissenter’ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr –
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in colour and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.
So yes! the next time you introduce someone as a companion, remember that, diachronically speaking, 😉 you are indeed continuing a centuries-old tradition of simply sharing your bread with them!
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