Bill Fairchild wrote: <begin extract> As languages evolve, several aspects of any given word can change: the spelling, the pronunciation, consonantal voicing or unvoicing, vowel shifting, and even the meaning. <end extract>
and of these the last is perhaps the most important. Geoffrey Chaucer described himself as 'lewd', by which he meant not that he had a preternatural interest in things sexual but that he was not a clergyman. Shakespeare repeatedly used the word "sad" to mean not sorrowful but [nearly] worthless, and there has been a colloquial recrudescence of this sense in recent years. When I began in this business "storage" mean only auxiliary|backing storage. Main storage was "memory", a usage that is certainly not obsolete and is preserved in acronyms like DRAM. If you want to know what a word or phrase means|meant with any precision you must associate a time and a place|dialect with your query. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
