March 27, 2006

Lexical drift (1)

Kalim Kassam pointed out to me an article in The Guardian with an interestingly extended sense of the word gaydar. The topic is the goth subculture:

Louise (she prefers not to give her surname) works in credit risk in Leeds. Aged 34, she got into goth music 17 years ago and now has tickets for the upcoming Sisters of Mercy tour. She reckons about "four or five people" at her workplace are former goths. "There's a kind of gaydar that lets you spot them."

You see how that works? The extension is from "subtle, quasi-extrasensory ability to detect that someone is a member of the gay subculture" to "subtle, quasi-extrasensory ability to detect that someone is a member of a subculture". That's a fairly typical example of the weird and wonderful processes of lexical semantic change.

It seems new, but Kalim is fairly sure he's heard similar instances before, and he's very likely to be right. He's aware of the recency illusion.

Word meanings are imperceptibly shifting all the time in surprising ways. It's like continental drift, only less predictable.

Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at March 27, 2006 09:44 AM