Nuts and Bolts: polysemy

 Is polysemy all Greek to you? Well, that's not surprising because it's all Greek to me, too (though, admittedly,with a Latin phase on the way).

Polysemy is dead simple unless you start thinking about it too hard, because then it gets murkier and murkier.

The basic idea is that for polysemy to exist there have to be words that look and sound the same, but they have to have different meanings.

That's easy enough, but polysemy has a further twist, because these words have to be related, and fairly obviously related, too.

For instance, to give you an example which isn't polysemy, the words mogul, meaning a powerful person, sounds and looks just the same as the word mogul meaning a bank of hard snow. One comes from Persian, and the other probably comes from a South German dialect word, but, even without knowing where the words come from, you wouldn't expect the two words to be connected. And they aren't. So mogul and mogul aren't polysemous.

On the other hand, the words bell, meaning thing which makes a clanging noise, and bell, a slang word for telephoning someone (I'll give them a bell) obviously are connected, and so they're an example of polysemy. 

And give, when you think about it, is another.

The difficulty is that sometimes people will see connections which aren't there (an ear on a head is nothing to do with an ear of corn, for instance) and miss connections which are (like toast, the drink, and toast, the piece of charred bread, perhaps). There's also no clear cut-off as to how far back the connection has to go.

Still, it's an interesting concept, and an oddly essential one. As G K Chesterton has pointed out, if we didn't hold the idea of polysemy in our heads (and we all do) then describing someone who shot his grandmother from a distance of five hundred yards as a good shot would imply approval of his action. 

Word To Consider Today: polysemy. The Latin form of this word is polysēmia, from the Greek polus, much, plus sēma, sign.