Like an expedition to the source of the Nile, any attempt to find the origins of a word runs aground when the trail vanishes into a realm without tangible records: oral culture. As Baroness Hussein-Ece – she who was "trapped in a queue in chav-land" – will tell you, Twitter is oral culture but with records. But words have power beyond their mere meaning. They still bear the hallmarks of the Garden of Eden, in which the language spoken by Adam contained the essence of the thing it described, and so controlled it.
The meaning of "chav" has been hotly contested (Polly Toynbee's piece received 1,152 comments), being deemed variously to refer to class, financial acuity, behavioural traits, lifestyle, sartorial choices, debt and housing. But another debate also raged, over the word's origin. While chavs themselves were universally derided, the word was laid claim to with something akin to pride: it derives variously from Cheltenham or Chatham average; it stands for council housed and violent; it started in Newcastle; "we used the word at school in the early 80s".
This is chicken and egg time. Before the egg hatches, the observer isn't sure what sort of egg it is. It hatches. The chick appears. The egg is retrospectively labelled a chicken egg. More to the point, perhaps, it is most often eaten. It's only when conditions are right that the chicken is allowed to appear. And so it is with words: a new word is used, then defined.
Chav seems to have come about severally and spontaneously in response to a need. This is common enough in other areas, such as Leibnitz and Newton "discovering" calculus (albeit in slightly differing modes), Darwin and Wallace conceiving of natural selection (30 or so years apart, true, but in evolutionary terms, simultaneously), and so on. Certain conditions allow for, or necessitate, discoveries or inventions – and new words.
But what about old words? In practically every Comment is free thread, at least one commentator starts with the words "In the OED …", as if this were the ultimate arbiter of meaning. Which is reasonable, because it is. Mostly. But words change, as Dr Johnson unhappily noted:
I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.Old words evolve, too, by stepping out of the dictionary and back into oral culture. Johnson's use of the word "science" perfectly illustrates his point. "Science" now means a specific mode of inquiry; indeed, it presents a certain type of knowledge guaranteed, so to speak, by the method that underpins it. It was first used in the modern sense in 1834. But when Johnson used it, he meant scientia, or knowledge in the broader sense. The use of the word "scientist" to describe anyone before 1834 is not only anachronistic, but erroneous.
This evolution of a word's meaning to take into account new ways of being can also be purposeful. Francis Bacon wrote in his Advancement of Learning (1605): "I desire, it may bee conceiued, that I vse the word METAPHISICKE, in a differing sense, from that, that is receiued: And in like manner I doubt not, but it will easilie appeare to men of iudgement, that in this and other particulars, wheresoeuer my Conception & Notion may differ from the Auncient, yet I am studious to keepe the Auncient Termes." He did so in part to challenge the accepted meaning and the system of knowledge to which these words were attached: a sort of linguistic colonialism.
Currently, the word slut is marching its way into its own mutation, and the OED definition is perhaps no longer sufficient. The question is this: when a word is undergoing a metamorphosis, where is its power? Until the battle over its meaning is won, what does it actually mean? Does it exist in a superposition of states, both positive and pejorative? Schrödinger's slut, anyone?
Pete Langman blogs at www.petelangman.wordpress.com