Semantics: What Did They Mean by That?

Friday was my birthday. Yes, 9/11. In the years after the World Trade Center disaster, people tended to express sympathy to me on my birthday, saying things like, “ I hope you can enjoy it, in spite of everything.” This past Friday, though, I heard nothing at all about 9/11 in my birthday messages.  

I find myself wondering how long it will be until the expression “9/11” becomes meaningless to the general population. Even now there may be full-grown adults reading this blog post who do not remember the shock and horror of September 11, 2001. So, when our descendants, hundreds of years from today, find a letter, diary, novel, or birthday card that refers to 9/11, will they be completely baffled? I suspect they will be.

They will have a puzzle to unravel, as we do with our ancestors’ writings.

Interpreting Words in Their Proper Context

An expression has the meaning given it by the people who use it at any given time. As we read things written by or read by our ancestors, we inevitably encounter expressions that we do not recognize. Or we encounter familiar words that seem to be used in an odd context. To understand our ancestors and their world, we must dig into their semantics. We must move beyond what they said to what they meant.

Familiar Words with Unfamiliar Meanings

Those trained in genealogical research will have encountered some kinship-related words that have changed in their meaning. The failure to understand those changes can result in substantial errors in family history research. The terms “junior” and “senior” after a name, for example, do not always mean father and son in earlier usage. (See “Junior, senior, and the perils of assuming they’re kin” for my discussion of this problem and the damage it can cause to a family tree.)

When encountering references to a father or son, uncle or nephew, in encounters that European explorers had with Native American groups, these family relationships were frequently misinterpreted. In many of the native tribes, the mother’s brother took the fatherly role over her children. Meanwhile their birth father was looking after his own sister’s children. European observers regularly misidentified an uncle as the father and vice versa. We may never undo the genealogical damage done by the histories written from accounts that suffered this misunderstanding.

The term “orphan” may also be misunderstood. A child whose parents could not support them might be referred to as an orphan. Or a child whose father was deceased might be called an orphan, though his mother was still alive.

The word “spinster” may also give us the wrong impression of a woman. Today, it would be considered bad manners to use the word at all. But not so long ago, the word referred to an unmarried woman who was likely to stay that way. The original term, however, referred to a woman who spun wool for cloth. It was an occupation. Many such women were unmarried and eventually the term was used interchangeably to mean that. There was quite a long period of time when “spinster“ was used in both ways. Therefore, we must be very careful not to assume a woman is unmarried when we see the word “spinster” associated with her name.

Lingo and Vernacular of the Time

While lingo and vernacular expressions appear much more in our present-day writing than they do in the writing of our ancestors, they do show up. You find them in letters, in newspapers, and in novels and plays. In the novel Beulah, by Augusta Evans Wilson, she describes a child with “a mass of rippling, jetty hair.” I have heard of a jetty as a shoreline feature. But after research, I find that she was referring to black hair.

If you are perusing a newspaper from the late 1850s and into the 1860s, you might encounter the word “Melainotype.” This technology for producing photographic images disappeared from common use long ago. But for a moment in time our ancestors would have seen advertising for Melainotypes, and perhaps passed their own image down to you in this form.

Such seeming flash-in-the-pan technologies may seem too temporal to worry about. But what if our ancestors consider that strange term “VHS tape” to be too briefly on the historical landscape to matter? It came and went about as fast as the Melainotype. Would you consider the VHS tapes to be insignificant to your story? I think most of us would say that the movies we watched and the videos we took of our children changed everything about our experience of daily life and how we spent our time. And while I cannot say that was true of the Melainotype, necessarily, it reminds me not to be quick to dismiss what a now-archaic technology meant to them.

Getting to the Meanings

So what can we do, when we encounter obsolete or reinvented words? I think it may be our tendency to scratch our heads and read on past them. But let’s not. When it comes to understanding a moment in time and place, someone needs to do the digging. And if not we, then who?

Sometimes it will be easy and quick to get an answer to the question, “What did that mean?” Sometimes it will take a bit of effort—worth it for the fun of breaking through to the meaning. And sometimes, after your efforts, you will have to scratch your head and walk away. But those times will be fewer and fewer as you learn to wield the tools below.

Dictionaries

It will come as no big surprise that dictionaries are our first and most important tool in seeking the meaning of a word or phrase. I usually start with the built-in dictionary in my browser , simply typing in the search line “define Melainotype.” This simple dictionary can even be effective at bringing up some of the archaic terms, though it did not find Melainotype. And it did not tell me that “jetty” had once meant black. Even when it does find the meaning of a defunct word, I keep in mind that this dictionary may not be able to tell me which form of a word was popular at the time my ancestor used it. But it is a quick and easy start.

Fortunately, we have ways to get a thorough historical background of a word or term. One amazing tool is the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The online edition is often available through your public library, if you have a card. Or if you have access to the databases of a university library, it is usually there. The OED gives you the etymology of a term and shows its various meanings, with examples of how it appeared in the literature of a time and place.

Think of the word “gay,” for example. The OED includes more than 12,000 words to describe what “gay” has meant to different people at different times. Some of the earliest uses of the word are in the 1200s and refer to something brightly colored. A century later it might mean well dressed. In certain regions, it meant that a person had a good mind. At times, it meant lighthearted or joyous. It might mean poetic. It even at one time referred to a dog holding its tail high. By the 1600s, it was used in some communities to mean a person who was promiscuous or hedonistic. In the 1800s it might refer to a woman who was a prostitute. And through many of these transitions, it still meant joyous and happy in many connotations. Not until the 1920s do we find the term used to describe a homosexual person.

So, with the word “gay” and many others, we must study the context around the word, considering the date and place to know what was really meant. The OED is invaluable to a genohistorian in this process.

You may also find very timely information by using online tools like Google Books or Internet Archive to find dictionaries that were published right around the time (and in the country) you have found the word used. Numerous variations of Noah Webster’s dictionaries can be consulted or even downloaded for free from Google Books. You can find dictionaries that explain ethnic terms. If you want to understand a term used by a Scottish ancestor in the early 19th century, for example, you might want to download the 1808 An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language: Illustrating the Words in Their Different Significations by Examples from Ancient and Modern Writers. You can even find dictionaries of slang, like The Slang Dictionary: Etymological, Historical, and Anecdotal, from 1874.

Google Search

A search of the Internet is also an obvious step in the right direction. It can be especially useful for something like “Melainotype,” thanks to the hobbyists, enthusiasts, experts, and scholars who are recreating for us the story of technologies, current and past. Again, we want to be ever watchful of time and place, asking, “What would my ancestors have been aware of?” Sometimes Google can get you there.

Newspapers, Magazines, and Novels

Sometimes, the resources above will fail to give you the answer to your semantic question. You might need to dig more deeply into the literature of the popular culture where and when your ancestor lived. Sometimes, there will simply be an inside joke that is never going to make it into the dictionary. 

For those who were old enough in 1989, do you remember an incident with an R&B duo called Milli Vanilli, who created a scandal by lip-syncing to someone else’s recordings? For years, the term “Milli Vanilli” became synonymous with being a fake. Let’s say you wrote a letter to someone in 1992 and used an expression like, “she pulled a Milli Vanilli.” And let’s say the letter survives and finds its way into the hands of your descendant in 2492. They probably will not get the joke. If they desire to understand it, they will need to read the popular culture around you in the years prior to your use of the term.

So that is what we need to do as well, if we want to understand what an unfamiliar expression meant. We need to search for the term in the materials they read or the materials published around that time. We may find answers in tools like Newspapers.com, the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America website, the American Periodical Series or the American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection (databases available in many university libraries), Google Books, and the Internet Archive.

Read the Culture

Certainly we want to first go after what is easy and fast: digitized, searchable sources. But if we truly want to understand a time and place, nothing could be more valuable than getting into the discipline of reading that culture. Don’t just search for an episode of the mystery term. Read the newspaper in the town you are studying. Read the novels the local newspaper says are for sale in the bookstore in your ancestors’ town. This is time-consuming, an all-out commitment. And I am saying this more to myself than to anyone, because I want to be the person who does this.

Here’s one great reason it is worth it to read the culture. You can get the joke. You understand the nuances in your ancestor’s letters or diary, or the real significance of what’s being said in a will or a trial transcript. When we can get the joke, we have entered our ancestors’ world.

Call to Action

This week, I encourage you to begin to collect dictionaries, either downloading them or creating a master list with links to them. They become your reference when you encounter antiquated words. Build your dictionary collection larger and more robust over time, and it will become easier and easier to tease out the meaning of an unfamiliar phrase.

Also, as always, I would love to hear your comments. Have you come across odd terms in your ancestor’s papers? I also encourage you to share this post with friends who will benefit from it. And if you are not yet on my mailing list, sign up in the form at the bottom of this page. I’ll make sure you know when new materials have been added to the Genohistory on Purpose blog.

Creating Your Dictionary Collection in Zotero

The dictionary collection I mentioned above can be very easily and effectively handled in Zotero. I have created a major collection called “General Library,” where I store anything I expect to use repeatedly in the years to come. Black’s Law Dictionary, for example, lives here. I collect references to atlases, encyclopedias, dictionaries, online databases, or anything of perpetual usefulness.

I’ve created a subcollection called “Dictionaries.” Whenever I encounter a dictionary that will be of use, I capture its bibliographic citation here. I am most interested in dictionaries I can use online, so there is also a URL to access them, or I download them as PDFs to my computer and link to them from Zotero.

As I begin to capture notes about terms that were of use in whatever research project I’m working on, each term becomes a note beneath the citation. It therefore becomes searchable in the future.

The citation information includes the date of publication, so I can sort all my dictionaries by date. When I encounter a mystery term in an 1834 letter, for example, I sort my dictionaries and find the 1831 copy of Noah Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language. I can begin there.

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