The Ghosts in Our Grammar

Every language is a graveyard of dead metaphors we no longer notice we are digging up. We "grasp" an idea, "weigh" our options and feel "moved" by a speech, blithely unaware that each phrase was once a vivid picture, long since worn smooth by handling. Words drift, too, in their allegiances: "nice" once meant foolish, and "awful" once inspired reverence rather than dread. To trace a word's genealogy is to eavesdrop on the anxieties and enthusiasms of the dead, whose fingerprints survive, invisibly, in the small change of everyday talk.