Today’s post is brought to you by the word butt! Which may seem totally off-topic from eighteenth-century dictionary quotation research, but it is, surprisingly, fully related. This post was actually inspired by a conversion I had with my supervisor during our weekly meeting when we discussed the way in which language has evolved over time, especially in relation to a particular find I made. The evolution of language is a truly fascinating interdisciplinary interest, being relevant to linguists, historians, and, of course, dictionary enthusiasts like you and me.
When researching quotes last week, I found an entry for “Falstaff (sir John), a famous butt.” Now, you might wonder why it would give me pause; butt means butt, right? It may seem strange to care so much about the meaning of words, but just like people, words have evolved over time and it’s something anyone evaluating history needs to think about it. Understanding how to interpret words in the context of their time is incredibly important and worth taking some time to dwell on in our discussion here. When we are reading a text written by someone who lived in 1755, we might see a word that we commonly use today and think we know what it means. Sometimes that’s accurate, but other times the way in which a word was used, and its meaning, can be totally different. The etymology of words is often used in the analyzation of history (particularly within cultural history), such as by Dominique Godineau, when they find a mistranslation (or misunderstanding) has completely skewed previous historical statistics or meaning.
This is why context is key when studying history: we must understand people and their culture within the confines of the times that they lived. Let’s look at “butt” as an example. I think we all have some idea as to what we mean we use the word today, but back when this word was entered in the Samuel Johnson Dictionary it had a variety of meanings – none of which were the common one we have today. In fact, over time it has meant a few different things, which you can also see depicted at the Oxford English Dictionary. So, while Sir Falstaff was apparently a famous butt, he was not a backside, if you will.
This exploration of the word butt also confirms the importance of making etymology and research accessible, because this helps us understand how language has changed over time. The historical information in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) that I linked above is not freely available; I have access to it because of my UCF login. Unlike OED, Johnson’s work is free to access through the Samuel Johnson Dictionary Project, which is certainly needed when researching that time period. Projects like ours, funded by the university and other grants, make public history actually public: they are freely available and anyone with internet access can access this information.
Things like this may not seem important initially, but this example reinforces not only the importance of context, but also how accessible history should be in general. The existing paywalls and lack of digitization could lead some to think that referring to Flastaff as a famous butt was insulting him or saying that he was actually a butt and not a real person at all - really, that might be the biggest (and funniest) misinterpretation of all. Though, I didn’t know him so maybe I’m wrong on that too – perhaps he was both kinds of butt. After all, there is a limit to how much we can glean from the context available!