Mind your language
`ANY DIFFERENCE between what Sinn Fein and the IRA say is semantic,' someone said on Radio Four the other day. I just managed to restrain my hus- band from shying the marmalade pot at the wireless .
Of course the difference is the oppo- site of semantic. What Sinn Fein and the IRA say is pretty much identical. But semantic has come to mean more or less the same as theological has — some- thing so theoretical or technical that it has no practical significance.
In fact semantic has gone through a semantic change. Linguists talk of `semantic fields' in which words live as if they were sheep. Now semantic itself has leapt over the fence. There is noth- ing actually immoral about this, but at the moment of the change a certain amount of ambiguity occurs which annoys some speakers and listeners hence the marmalade-lobbing attempt.
Actually, a similar change to semantic has happened before. It comes etymo- logically from a Greek verb meaning 'to show'. Its English sense of 'relating to meaning' dates only from the 19th cen- tury. But two centuries earlier it was used to signify our word meteorological: signs of the weather, such as a red sky at night.
Perhaps between 1680 and 1880 some pedant chucked a book across the room when he found semantic referring to words instead of weather.
Dot Wordsworth
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