Mark Twain — Words of the week

I saw this word in the blurb of a book I was looking at, where it referred to an ‘ornery teen’. In case you haven’t come across it before, it means ‘bad-tempered or difficult to deal with’. Despite its grumpy meaning, it’s a nice word, right? But where does it come from? Well, it turns out that ‘ornery’ actually has quite an ordinary background. Literally.

Let’s take a trip to 18th-century America. The word ‘ordinary’ was often slurred in speech to something like ‘ornary’ or ‘ornery’. Because of that, this pronunciation became associated with rural, working-class or ‘uneducated’ speakers. It then started to pick up negative connotations, implying something a bit rougher or more unsophisticated than ‘ordinary’. Over time, it moved even further from its ordinary roots, coming to mean contrary, grumpy or mean-spirited.

You’re most likely to hear ‘ornery’ in the south or midwest of Murica. It turns up a lot in ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ by Mark Twain. He often uses it to show a kind of cranky self-loathing or backwoods stubbornness (this novel is also one of the earliest and most famous literary uses of the word):

‘… though I couldn’t make out how he was a-going to be any better off then than what he was before, seeing I was so ignorant, and so kind of low-down and ornery.’
‘There was empty drygoods boxes under the awnings, and loafers roosting on them all day long, whittling them with their Barlow knives; and chawing tobacco, and gaping and yawning and stretching—a mighty ornery lot.’

‘Ornery’ is an example of how pronunciation, social attitudes and a bit of good old-fashioned snobbery can shape the meaning of a word. This is called semantic drift. Not the snobbery bit – ‘semantic drift’ is where words acquire new senses, lose old ones or completely change their meaning (like how ‘gay’ shifted from meaning ‘cheerful’ to ‘homosexual’).

Semantic drift can lead to ‘polysemy’, which is when a word ends up with more than one meaning at the same time – like ‘wicked’, for example, which can mean ‘evil’ (from ‘wicca’, the Old English word for a male sorcerer) or ‘super cool’. As well as polysemy, ‘wicked’ is also an example of semantic inversion – where a word flips to mean its opposite (‘sick’ is another one that’s done that in slang).

Finally, if you’re looking for a band name, ‘semantic drift’ would be awesome.

I once got told off by a client for writing ‘a myriad of XXX’. She said that it should be simply ‘myriad’ whatever it was, because ‘myriad’ is only an adjective (a describing word), not a noun (a person, place or thing). Because I only remember the mean things people say to me, many years later I’ve finally googled this, and it turns out she was WRONG. And in this post I’m going to tell you why. (She’s not a client anymore. Not because of that. Honest.)

Before we get into that, let’s talk about what ‘myriad’ means (although I’m sure you know that already, clever reader). As an adjective – as in ‘he has myriad issues’ – it means ‘innumerable’ i.e. too many to be numbered AKA a buttload. As a noun – as in ‘he has a myriad of issues’ – it means either a buttload again or, specifically 10,000. Why 10,000? Well, in ancient Greek, the word for 10,000 was μυριάς, which was pronounced ‘myrias’. Over time this word evolved and was used more broadly to talk about the concept of a vast or countless number. We then started using it figuratively to describe an indefinitely large quantity or multitude. It was adopted into English as ‘myriad’ in the mid-1500s.

So why was that client so insistent that it was only an adjective? Well, apparently lots of folks were taught this at school. But much like ‘you can’t start a sentence with “and” or “but”’, and ‘you can’t end a sentence with a conjunction’, this is another ‘rule’ that has absolutely no basis in fact. When ‘myriad’ appeared in the English language in the mid-1500s it was as a noun, not an adjective. And it went on to appear as such in works by writers including Milton, Thoreau and Twain – and they did alright with the words. ‘Myriad’ as an adjective didn’t actually appear until 200 years later. So stick that in your pipe and smoke it, client.

Petty, moi?