Patty Hester, age 15, of Tulsa, Okla., for her question:
HOW DO WE GET NEW WORDS?
Words have a way of changing their meanings. Imp used to mean a young shoot of a plant. Then it came to mean child, and prayers cffered for the health of the Prince of Wales once referred to him as "That most angelic imp." Today the word means a mischievous child or a little devil or demon. Cab is short for cabriolet which originally meant a leap or caper.
Etymology is the study of the history and development of words. It is concerned with the origins of words, their relations to similar words in other languages and the way their meanings have changed through the years.
We get new words by having people use them. Every new word starts with a certain form and a certain meaning. When enough people want a given word to have another meaning, however, it is changed.
Etymology gives a fuller and clearer understanding of what a word means. It also helps us understand what long and difficult words mean.
Cognates are words that descend from a common ancestor. Chase and catch, for example, both come from the Latin word captare.
Most of the languages of Europe are related to English. They make up what we call the Indo European family of languages.
The English word mother, for example, comes from the Anglo Saxon modor. It is a cognate, or closely related, to the German word mutter, the Swedish and Danish word moder, the Latin word mater, the French mere, the Italian madre, the Old Irish mathir, the Sanskrit mata and many others among this family of languages.
Words, like the human beings who speak them, change constantly. The rate of change depends on both human and historical causes.
There are special changing vocabularies peculiar to religion, science, art and social life. These vocabularies add new words regularly to the language.
The space age and recent developments on the scientific front have also brought lots of new words to every person's vocabulary.
A language remains alive and continues to develop with the introduction of new words just as long as people speak it.
Some new words come from coinage, which is the invention of a word by a manufacturer, such as zipper and Kodak. Hybrid words combine parts from two or more languages. A neologism is a newly coined word that has not been generally accepted.