Opening archive room
Following the source trail...
Archive room
Explore the shifting meanings of words through time, rhetoric, myth pressure, and semantic drift.
Start with one doorway
Begin with one full file, one shelf-sized argument, or one pressure slice. Search works better after the room has taught its shape.
Middle English girle or gerle.
The category narrowed. What could once refer to a young person generally settled into a gendered label.
Old English mete, food.
English carved the broad food term down to one major category on the plate.
Old English deor, wild animal or beast.
A once-general animal word was claimed by one recognizable creature class.
Old English hund, dog.
The broad word survived in German as Hund, but English narrowed hound to a subtype.
Old English fugol, bird.
The general bird term narrowed until it mostly points to birds on the farm or table.
Old English steorfan, to die.
The general end point narrowed to one especially vivid cause.
Old English lust, pleasure or delight.
Moral pressure narrowed a broad desire word into a more charged register.
French toilette, a small cloth, from toile, cloth.
Toilet traveled through fabric, grooming, dressing rooms, and euphemism before settling on plumbing.