Style And Semantic Drift
Old words and old meanings
I’ve recommended old books for your style. Picking up the vocabulary and sentence structure of old helps write in a “timeless” style that at least does not smack of your exact year while you are writing in a historical era, or a far-distant future, or a high-land world where you are no longer in the fields we know.1
Some vocabulary changes are easy if you have the words. Obviously, some are important because they tie into world-building. You should speak of a kingdom’s subjects, not its citizens, since it is not a republic. Your hero should court his love interest, not date her.2
But even when you are not world-building and suggesting the changes by your words, it is wise to use older words. Your characters should not say, “Okay,” but “All right” or some such. They should not speak of data but of knowledge.
Should they speak of information?
Ah, that’s where the fun really starts. Would your characters think of information as you do? Or would it still be colored by the usage that correlates to “informer” -- which still means a sneak who passes information secretly to people, especially to the police?
Obscure, archaic, or obsolete words do not have this problem. If you write of a farrier, you may baffle readers, particularly if you provide no clues to hint that he’s a fitter of horseshoes, but you will not mislead them. Misleading is the grave danger.
For instance, suppose you run across a reference to “ancient.” Let us suppose it is in Edmund Burke’s speech on conciliation with America:
we wholly abrogated the ancient government of Massachusetts
Now, nowadays I do not think anyone would describe Massachusetts as “ancient” even with the addition of a century and a half, but it was ancient at that time. Indeed, I have run across references to “ancient” practices that were instituted within the lifetime of people still alive.
Loaded terms are particularly fraught with danger. Take Ivan the Terrible. At the time when that became the standard translation of his byname grozny, “terrible” still meant “inspiring terror.” “Formidable” would be a more reasonable term nowadays.
Many terms meaning high praise have now come to mean insults. I suspect envy, but the effect is nevertheless there. You can not use “condescending” to mean “gracious to those in inferior positions” or “specious” to mean actually attractive, instead of only apparently so.
When talking of the Fair Folk, many people talk of the Seelie Court and the Unseelie Court. This remains in a regional spelling because the alternative of Silly Court and Unsilly Court conveys the wrong idea entirely. At the time it was originally used, it mean the Holy Court and the Unholy Court.
This is, on the whole, a bad thing because it makes language less useful. It blunts fine distinctions so that the writer must express in many words what could have been said in one without it. I recommend C.S. Lewis’s Studies in Words to look at the prolonged decay of words. (Not all of them. Some have useful meanings to this day.)
As a writer, sometimes we can put up a struggle for a distinction before it’s lost.
If the changes we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? it remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language.
Samuel Johnson
Alas, some distinctions are lost to us. We must sigh and go on, paraphrasing to try to get the timeless effect without confusing our readers.