QJM Advance Access originally published online on April 8, 2009
QJM 2009 102(7):509-510; doi:10.1093/qjmed/hcp014
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When I use a word ... Fulsomely banning ‘compendious’
Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, 1865
Words change their meanings as language evolves. Take ‘ban’. It comes from the hypothetical Indo-European root BHA, to speak. In Greek BHA became 
(PHA), giving 
(phasis, speech), 
(ph
n
, sound) and 
(phm, voice).
Polyphemus had perhaps a lot to say, a loud voice, or a wide reputation (fame). Phemius was Odysseus's renowned minstrel. Other derivatives include blasphemy and euphemism. Dysphasia and paraphasia are disorders of speech, and phatic utterances communicate feelings rather than ideas. Gramophones, telephones, megaphones and microphones convey sounds in their different ways, and a phoneme is the smallest linguistic unit of sound.
The Romans took the root BHA and made it FA, from which they derived fari (to speak). An infant cannot speak. Fables, like Aesop's, tell stories, as do patients with confabulation. Fame is what stories give you, and fate is what is thereby foretold. A preface is something that is said before something else. One who is affable is easy to speak to. And then, as Wittgenstein said, there is the ineffable, the unspeakable, which ‘supplies the background whereby what I say becomes meaningful’ (Vermischte Bemerkungen).
Through the Teutonic branch of Indo-European, BHA in Old English became ban, which originally meant to proclaim or summon by proclamation. Banns proclaim a forthcoming marriage. And what was banned (i.e. proclaimed to be done) became banal, originally feudally obligatory and then, because communal, commonplace or trite. Later, a proclamatory ban became maledictory, typically implying religious anathema or a curse. Eventually ban came to mean to prohibit, influenced perhaps by banish, to outlaw by proclamation. So now, instead of a word that means to speak, we have a word that means to prevent from speaking. The technical term for this type of semantic change is diachronic auto-antonymy.1
The time line of the main changes in the meanings of the noun ‘ban’ (Figure 1) shows the date of the first instance of each meaning as given in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). It took nearly 400 years for the meaning of ‘ban’ to change from proclamation to prohibition. Not all semantic drift takes this long, but the language can be very conservative.
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If enough people misuse a word, its meaning will eventually change. ‘Fulsome’ is an excellent example. The main definition in the OED says it all: ‘Of language, style, behaviour, etc.: Offensive to good taste; esp. offending from excess or want of measure or from being "over-done". Now chiefly used in reference to gross or excessive flattery, over-demonstrative affection, or the like.’ In fact, ‘fulsome’, connected with ‘full’ rather than ‘foul’, originally meant ‘Characterized by abundance, possessing or affording copious supply’ (OED, first recorded in the 13th century). In the 17th century it started to mean overgrown and rank, rather than simply abundant. Now the wheel has come full circle, with a reverse shift in meaning from an offensive to a praiseworthy sense (more auto-antonymy), generating ambiguity. Those who understand the word's nuances now cannot use it.
Sometimes misunderstandings cause changes in meaning. Take ‘compendium’ and ‘compendious’. Here, for example, is George Steiner, Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, in a chapter entitled ‘The Tongues of Eros’ in his 2008 volume of essays My Unwritten Books: ‘The most compendious of dictionaries is no more than an abridged shorthand, obsolescent even as it is published.’ Steiner's writing is often very hard to understand, sometimes impenetrable to the ordinary reader, although he can be very amusing, even while remaining obscure (from the same text, ‘Masturbation enacts the paradoxes of soliloquy’). However, it is clear that he thinks that ‘compendious’ means ‘encyclopaedic’, which it does not.
According to the OED, a compendium is ‘an abridgement or condensation of a larger work or treatise, giving the sense and substance, within smaller compass’. It is Latin for that which is weighed together, rather than separately. To clarify, I might make a compendium out of an encyclopedia by including all the entries it contains but abbreviating them. ‘Compendious’ is defined as ‘containing the substance within small compass, concise, succinct, summary; comprehensive though brief’. Examples include William Salmon's Synopsis Medicinae, or a Compendium of Astrological, Galenical, & Chymical Physick (1671) and A Compendious Medical Dictionary by Robert Hooper (1798).
Bob Burchfield, in The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (1996), says that ‘Like many words indicating size, [compendious] is somewhat extendible in meaning, and is often misleadingly applied to works that are more marked by their comprehensiveness than by their conciseness.’ This misuse may have been influenced by its similarity to words such as ‘comprehensive’ and ‘complete’. Here are two excellent examples. The first is from a book called Ancient Forestry (1969): ‘Livy's history is an extraordinarily compendious work’; Livy's History of Rome From its Foundation consisted of 142 volumes. The second is in the title of a 1967 paper in the Serbian journal Vojnosanitetski Pregled (the Military-Medical and Pharmaceutical Review), ‘Enciklopedije kao prirucnici znanja’, translated in Pubmed as ‘Encyclopedias as a compendium of knowledge.’2
I have no evidence that this change in meaning occurred before the 1960s. The OED is silent on the matter. I sought information from its Chief Editor, John Simpson, but he replied, ‘Thanks for the tip. I see the Shorter [Oxford English Dictionary], in which "compendious" has been updated quite recently, also omits this use. We’d better do something about it!’. Thus, Steiner's statement about dictionaries, misleading though it is, nevertheless demonstrates its own truth: the encyclopedic OED is indeed abridged—it does not define ‘compendious’ as Steiner uses it.
Neither Fowler in Modern English Usage (1926) nor Gowers in his 1965 revision mentioned ‘compendious’. Eric Partridge, that acute observer of the verbal zeitgeist, noted it in his Usage and Abusage (1947), but merely to say that it ‘may be applied to something that is briefly comprehensive, for its meaning is "compact", "concise", "summary", "succinct" ’. Partridge was more interested in saying that ‘comprehensive is obsolete in Standard English—and now regarded as catachrestic when careless writers, ignorant of the history of the word, use it in the sense "containing much in small compass" ’. The reverse of the problem with ‘compendious’.
In only 40 years, if my dating is correct, ‘compendious’ has come to mean either ‘comprehensive but concise’ or ‘encyclopedic’, and is increasingly being used to mean the latter. ‘Compendium’ is also, for example, being used in bioinformatics to mean a comprehensive database, as in The Species Compendium, 3 and compendium analysis.4 But what shall we call a proper compendium when ‘compendium’ is being used to mean an encyclopedia or a database? There are many possible alternatives, but all are obsolete (abbreviature, breviate, pantology, and summulary) or have other meanings (epitome, landscape, marrow and medulla, and syllabus). We have lost a useful word.
References
1. Blank A. Polysemy in the lexicon. In: Meaning Change—Meaning Variation—Eckardt R, von Heusinger K, eds. Accessed 24 January 2009. Proceedings of a workshop held at Konstanz, vol. 1, 1999: 11–29. [http://www.ub.uni-konstanz.de/kops/volltexte/2000/507/pdf/ap106_03.pdf].
2. Zaric MD. Enciklopedije kao prirucnici znanja. Vojnosanit Pregl (1967) 24:172–3.[Medline]
3. Thormann I, Metz T, Engels JMM. The Species Compendium (release 1.0; December 2004). Accessed 24 January 2009. [http://www.bioversityinternational.org/Information_Sources/Species_Databases/Species_Compendium/].
4. Wieghaus KA, Gianchandani EP, Paige MA, Brown ML, Botchwey EA, Papin JA. Novel pathway compendium analysis elucidates mechanism of pro-angiogenic synthetic small molecule. Bioinformatics (2008) 24:2384–90.
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