{"id":373554,"date":"2010-02-28T16:20:48","date_gmt":"2010-02-28T21:20:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2148"},"modified":"2010-02-28T16:20:48","modified_gmt":"2010-02-28T21:20:48","slug":"language-log-asks-you-again-another-quiz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/373554","title":{"rendered":"Language Log asks you again: another quiz"},"content":{"rendered":"

What do loads, accumulations, obligations, and (idiomatic) kicks have in common with management, custody, people in care, sets of instructions, expenditures, liabilities, prices, loan records, and allegations?
\n<\/span>
\nYou know I hate it when everyone shouts at once. Form an orderly line and enter your answers below. Reload in a different window before submitting to make sure somebody didn’t just give the answer you were going to give: Language Log quizzes tend to get answers submitted within about nine minutes of appearance.<\/p>\n

[Later]
\nOK, as you see, it took less than half an hour on a slow Sunday night for someone to spot that the astonishingly polysemous noun charge<\/I><\/B> bears all of the above senses, and Tim Silverman is the winner, beating catsidhe by less than a minute. You can look the word up on Webster’s here<\/A>. A charge may be the load of explosive in a bullet or shell or an accumulation of electricity or some metaphorically similar force (a poem can carry an emotional charge); a charge may be placed on you in the sense of an obligation or duty; you can get a charge out of doing something exciting; being in charge of something means managing it and being in someone’s charge is being in their custody; if you are the guardian of some young people they are described as your charges; the judge gives a charge to a jury; you can notice illicit charges on your credit card bill; there may be a charge for some service; a library has a charge on a book when its records show that it has been lent out; and if you commit a crime you may find a criminal charge brought against you.<\/p>\n

How the hell do we manage with a word that has this many meanings?
\nI didn’t even get to all its senses; I was going to include “onrushing military assault, especially of infantry or cavalry”, but I simply forgot that one. There are several others that could have been added. And then a whole lot more meanings for the related verb.<\/p>\n

I really don’t do lexical semantics, but I really am struck by the astonishing degree of polysemy in English: words that have multiple meanings, sometimes recognizably if distantly related (charge<\/I> has an etymology going back to the same Latin root as the word car<\/I>), but sometimes apparently a thousand miles away from each other conceptually. Prescriptivists get so red-faced furious about the idea that a word might develop a new meaning or function (that disinterested<\/I> might pick up a second meaning “bored” alongside “unbiased”, for example); but they never say a word about most of the cases of rampant polysemy in the dictionary.<\/p>\n

Charge<\/I><\/B> is not just ambiguous, having two separable meanings; it is multifariously, outrageously, promiscuously polysemous. What it suggests is that human languages do not<\/B> strive to avoid ambiguity. They do not<\/B> try to align words with meanings one to one. It follows (since things don’t fall apart just because we have thousands of words like charge<\/I>) they are not<\/B> in danger of anarchy when a new word sense evolves. People don’t just tolerate languages with multiply polysemous words, they seem to love them; they thrive on multiplicity of meaning. There are thousands of examples that show this. It is only the prescriptivist thickheads who cannot see what that means…<\/p>\n

But wait a minute; I seem to have said some of this before<\/A>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What do loads, accumulations, obligations, and (idiomatic) kicks have in common with management, custody, people in care, sets of instructions, expenditures, liabilities, prices, loan records, and allegations? You know I hate it when everyone shouts at once. Form an orderly line and enter your answers below. Reload in a different window before submitting to make […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4148,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-373554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373554\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}