Greg Anderson

TL #13,

You are very spot on when it comes to the morphing of words over time. Even relatively short periods of time. Consider for example, the following scenario of fiction from the U.S. Gilded Age (1st Gilded Age) in which some college age children of the meat packing barons of Chicago (circa 1897) are gathered in the parlor of the mansion of one of their fathers:

Edgar has recently learned to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata flawlessly and is confident that it will impress Katharine, the object of his amorous hopes. Poor Edgar! Just as he gets to the some of the most sublime bars ever written for the keyboard, Katharine rolls her eyes and exclaims: “Oh Edgar! not that awful old dirge again, can’t you play something gay? Something by that Negro fellow Joplin?”

Something gay? People simply do not use those kinds of expressions anymore because they no longer mean what they did over a century ago. My point is simply this, if a fairly innocuous word such as gay could have such drastic changes in meaning in little over a century, how much could the word kephale have mutated from the Axial Age (time of the Septuagint) to the time of Chrysostom?