Infallibility

I'm an English teacher. I admit it freely. It's a better occupation than being, say, a drug dealer, but not nearly as much fun.
The problem is that people tend to think that I am the final authority on all things having to do with grammar and language. I get friends who phone me for advice. Sometimes I have to tell them, "It really doesn't make much difference," or "We really don't know," or "since language changes, that's in flux." As an example of the last -- someone asked me recently about the differences between uninterested and disinterested. I replied that traditionally, uninterested meant "having no interest in," and disinterested meant "having no opinion on." I continued that disinterested is acquiring the meaning that was formerly given to uninterested. That is, the sentence, "Charlie was disinterested in the outcome," could mean "Charlie had no opinion about the outcome," or "Charlie didn't care about the outcome."
This elicited puzzled silence. How could it be, my caller asked, that things could change like that? Shouldn't language stay put? Isn't there a proper English somewhere that we can adhere to?
Well, possibly, but "proper" changes. At one time, mob wasn't proper. If I remember right, mob is short for a Latin phrase mobus vulgaris -- "the common people in motion."
We can wish all we want, but the fact is language is changing even as we talk about it.

Meaning is much more

The meaning of a word is very often much more than what you'll learn if you use Webster as your source. Today, playing Scrabble with my sister, I used the word "braless," which you will note, has seven letters.

The dictionary defines braless as, "not wearing a bra."

Wait a minute, though. I'm not wearing a bra, but I wouldn't describe myself as braless. So, there has to be something more to it.

You'll have gotten it now: braless means "Not wearing a bra when it's normal that a person would be wearing one." And it's also clear that braless is a gender-specific word. It applies in all cases to women. There is an episode of Seinfeld in which Kramer invents a bra for men, but in order to specify what it is, he has to invent a name for it. He calls it the "bro." This underlines the fact that women wear bras; men don't.

There are a number of words that have this gender-specificity, though not often as strongly as with braless. The word "oaf," for instance, is always male. There aren't any female oafs. Same for "blockhead" and "dolt." On the other hand, "airhead" and "bubblehead" are female.

You can read into this what you want regarding female and male roles.

Is the game afoot

A friend recently asked me about the term "afoot." His question was, "Could you say, 'I was on a horse and she was afoot'?" Please notice the very tricky punctuation and I think I got it right. Anyway, there were voices in the background and I could tell that a bet was on the line.

"Sure," I said. "It's kind of an old-fashioned word, and we'd probably say 'on foot' today."

After my friend hung up, I wondered what had occasioned the bet. Then I remembered a phrase attributed to Sherlock Holmes, but one he never actually uttered in one of Conan Doyle's stories. It's "The game is afoot."

A game walking? Of course not. In this case, the meaning of the word is "happening." Something is afoot.

So, what we have is a word with two meanings. Actually, it'd probably be more accurate to say that we have two different words which just happened to be spelled the same. The word "run" in "a run of good luck," is clearly connected to the original meaning of the word "run," and can be seen to be a metaphor. Sometimes, though, as with "afoot," the meanings have separated too far. Or, it might be the case that the two words "afoot" in fact come from different roots. I'll have to look that one up.