Vital Sparks: Thou art pitiful and kind

If there’s anything I learned studying linguistics, it’s this: language changes over time, and it’s very hard to do anything about it.  “Nice” used to mean “foolish,” and now it means “pleasant.” A “knave” used to mean a boy or servant, and later came to mean a “cad,” and now isn’t used much at all. Linguists call this “semantic drift” or “semantic change”. Most of the lyrics in The Sacred Harp come from the 18th and 19th centuries, and it would be very surprising if the language of these lyrics were exactly the same as the language we use today, even when we use formal registers such as religious poetry.

Thanks to Rowan Simms for suggesting this topic, which I think will be fun to look at. Rowan suggested looking at pitiful, found in 571 HAMRICK:

Lord, I would be as Thou art;
Give me Thine obedient heart.
Thou art pitiful and kind;
Let me have Thy loving mind.

In modern English, noted Rowan, pitiful typically means “worthy of pity,” but in Wesley’s text, talking about God, it means “full of pity.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Wesley’s use is very much in line with its first attestation, “For thou..art pityful [Latin miserator] and merciable” from a psalter from around 1350. But the sense of “worthy of pity” is quite old as well, going back to the late 1400’s. So, in this case, one of the meanings of “pitiful” has gone out of the language.

A similar plight occurs with another adjective: awful, which originally only meant something like “awe-inspiring” or even “fear-inspiring,” as is evident in its use in The Sacred Harp:

His head with awful glories crowned (120 CHAMBERS)
Thou awful judge of quick and dead (131 MESSIAH)
Sweet majesty and awful love (362 NORWICH; 536 SWEET MAJESTY)

By the late 1700s, this word begins to have the meaning of “very unfortunate or undesirable” as well. I think we can see a bit of this turn in two texts, which, I think, still contain some of the “awe-inspiring” sense:

From heav’n the awful mandate flies, The father of his country dies. (131 MOUNT VERNON)
But oh, the sad and awful state Of those who stand and come too late (60 DAY OF WORSHIP)

But the modern meaning of “very bad in quality” (not found until the early 1900s) can create a humorous association at times; for example, in: 

Hark! the trumpet’s awful sound (295 IOWA)

This raises a question: What to do with these incongruous, and potentially humorous instances of semantic drift? Personally, I allow myself an internal chuckle, but otherwise, I look to the authorial intent.

Perhaps the semantic drift some people most humorous is the change in meaning of “bowels,” particularly in 68 PISGAH.

Jesus, Thou art the sinner’s friend,
As such I look to Thee;
Now in the bowels of Thy love,
O Lord, remember me.

I recall someone standing up to lead PISGAH and poking fun at the song. But the song is a plea to be remembered viscerally, which, etymologically, is just another way of saying “in the viscera, the guts, the bowels.” We have all known the gut punch of getting very bad news, or the butterflies of young love. Our gut is an emotional location.

The text of 430 ARBACOOCHEE actually reflects a change from Isaac Watts’s original words. We have the following, attested quite early (in 1785, according to Hymnary.org, about 45 years after Watts’s original poem):

Behold the love, the gen’rous love,
That holy David shows;
Behold his kind compassion move
For his afflicted foes!

But Watts originally wrote:

Behold the Love, the generous love,
That holy David shows;
Hark, how his sounding bowels move
To his afflicted foes!

Let’s finish up this first installment of semantic drift with the word conversation. In 69t MINISTER’S FAREWELL,  254 WARSAW, and 382 COSTON, conversation seems to have something like its current meaning:

Your love to me has been most free,
Your conversation sweet.

Similarly, in 55 CONVERSE:

I’m tired of visits, modes and forms,
And flatt’ries paid to fellow worms;
Their conversation cloys.

But something else is going on in  205 PLEASANT HILL:

Let deep repentance, faith, and love,
Be joined with godly fear;
And all my conversation prove
My heart to be sincere.

The OED lists an obsolete meaning of conversation: “The action of living or having one's being in a place or among persons. Also figurative of one's spiritual being.” They state this meaning was lost by the beginning of the 1700s or so. This sense is quite common in the King James Version of the Bible, from 1611. For example, in the letter To the Ephesians: “Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh” (2:3) and “That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts” (4:22). Modern translations tend to use something like “way of life” for the Greek word anastrophē.

Semantic drift can lead to misunderstanding, and on occasion, to humor. But taking these texts and authors seriously means trying to understand their original intentions.

Send me your favorite example of semantic drift from The Sacred Harp, and maybe I can use it in a future column!