I've often labelled myself as a "carpenter of words" and have long been fascinated by words themselves. Not only have I fallen in love with a beautiful verse, a well written essay, or a beautifully structured sentence or phrase. Even a single, stand-alone word often holds my thrall.
I look at a word and wonder - whence did it come, from which far off land? How did it come to mean what it means?
For, make no mistake, as languages grow, so too, words. A word that is familiar today may well have meant something else, entirely different in another day/age.
As I type these random thoughts on my phone, I glance at my battery icon. I have 21% power and will soon need to plug my phone in. For which, everyone reading this would recognize that I must use a charger....
But picture yourself as some English resident from the 11th or 12th century, and ask your neighbour or brother, "Have you seen my charger?" He is probably not going to be puzzled. He may well say, "Why, yes certainly. The beast is in the stable, being tended to by our ostler" Puzzled? A charger was a horse back in those troubled and turbulent days, a war horse, or otherwise known as a destrier...
Cut. Not back to our present. But a time in the 70s. A book. And a movie based on it. Was the rage for well nigh a decade. An autobiography of a French prisoner, Henri Charriere, called Papillon (Butterfly) Made immortal on screen in 70mm, by Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman... And those of you who read the book no doubt know what 'charger' meant. For the uninitiated, my lips shall remain sealed.
