We’ve all been there. We learn a new, fancy word, form an understanding of its meaning based on the context where we’ve heard it, try it out for the first time, and—based on the interlocutor’s reaction—realize that our understanding of the word’s meaning wasn’t quite in line with that of other people.
A friend of mine told me a story about a friend of hers, who had apparently misunderstood the expression al dente and used it about the weather, meaning that the temperature was just right—not too hot, not too cold. Although it is a funny anecdote, the mechanisms behind this are not as strange as they may seem. In fact, many expressions have come about in a similar way.
The borrowed Italian expression al dente, which literally means something like ‘to the tooth’, is used for expressing the optimal degree of cooking for pasta, which should have a bit of uncooked core for the right amount of chewiness. Pasta is al dente when it is just right: not overcooked, not undercooked. For a speaker of Italian, the expression is semantically transparent, but this is not necessarily the case for the Swedish speaker quoted above. What has likely happened is that the person, probably unaware of the original Italian meaning, has extended the use of al dente from the very narrow domain of pasta cooking instructions – where it can conceivably be thought of as a synonym of ‘just right’ – into a broader domain of usage, including the temperature outside.
An al dente amount of pasta?
Within the terminology of semantic change (that is, change in meaning), we are dealing with a type of change called widening, which means that the context of usage of a word or expression is broadened. The example above would probably be viewed by most as a misunderstanding by a single individual, but such “misunderstandings” can take off! The word salary, from Latin salārium, has a similar history. It used to refer to a soldier’s allotment of salt, but later came to mean ‘wages’ in general, and likely passed through a stage where it was seen by some speakers as a misunderstanding of the word’s meaning. If we compare the two meaning changes, we see that they are indeed very similar:
Original context New context al dente ‘just right (in a specific context)’ > ‘just right (in general)’ salary ‘wages (of a specific kind)’ > ‘wages (in general)’
Next time you’re faced with a situation like this, try to imagine the path of meaning change instead of just writing it off as incorrect. It makes language a lot more fun! It also makes for more interesting etymologies, so don’t be shy about using newly acquired expressions – chances are you will put a smile on a future historical linguist’s face, when they try to work out what outside temperature has to do with teeth.
References
Campbell, L. (2004) Semantic Change and Lexical Change (Chapter 9). In: Historical Linguistics: An Introduction (2nd ed.). Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh.
Taina
Very intresting