Mind your language
`I AM just a sad old Treklde, really,' said Miss Anita Karr, a 32-year-old stu- dent at Portsmouth University, who is writing a dissertation on the Klingon language. Klingon is not necessarily an agglutinative tongue, as its name might suggest, but is an invented language inspired by the popular science fiction series on television, Star Trek.
But the word sad is English and has recently taken on a new semantic bur- den. I checked it with my daughter Veronica, now 13. 'Ira,' she said, sounding distressingly like the Princess of Wales. '1 mean anyone who spends all their time with books and won't go out to a club is really sad. Or those men in the park in mackintoshes are sad.' So, there we have a meaning of `social inadequacy or perversion'. But the word has come a long way. C.S. Lewis gives it a very good treatment in his Studies in Words (Cambridge, 1960). He connects it semantically with the Latin gravis, meaning 'heavy'.
Now, this can go off in two directions, either towards the meaning 'serious' or the meaning 'heavy', as in the sense Meaning business'. Lewis presumably lived too soon to find men in the Eagle and Child who started 'coming on heavy'.
As for sad, although in English it ?nee meant 'full up', it came to mean solid', 'grave', 'unhappy', and, it may be argued, 'thorough-going'. The last meaning may be detected in the 18th century sad dog, sad slut.
For Veronica's meaning of sad we must think not of what makes people sad but of what we think a sad, thor- ough-going (if not necessarily basket) case.
Dot Wordsworth
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