APHASIA|Etymology, Memory, and History

I often reflect on how words change forms, sounds, and connotations over time, sometimes getting elevated in the hierarchy of the ‘formal/educated’ and ‘informal/colloquial’ registers, and how this amelioration/denigration of context can throw up interesting insights into the human psyche. I have found that social prejudices play a huge role in determining which words go from having relatively neutral connotations to downright negative ones: ‘villain’ used to simply mean someone of the village, and from there we get ‘vile’ and ‘villainy’, implying that those who don’t belong to the nobility are necessarily evil.

The interplay between language, memory, and the human psyche has meant that by tracing the origins of words, one can get a deeper picture of what human beings throughout history have valued as worthy of respect, and what they have considered worthy of denigration. For instance, ‘sensibility’ used to mean emotional vulnerability in the Regency era, whereas now it means rationality (the French sensibilité was directly borrowed with the same meaning, but over time, the English equivalent has acquired quite the opposite significance).