Specialization and generalization - definitions

Words can also undergo specialization, when there is a narrowing of meaning.
In the 1611 Bible (Authorized version or King James Bible) we are told that God `formed every beast of the field, and every foule of the aire! (Genesis)
There the word foule (modern spelling fowl) means `bird'.
Today, we use it in a more restricted or specialized sense; a fowl is not any bird, but a particular kind of bird - the chicken; or, as the OED puts it, it is `a domestic cock or hen; a bird of the genus Gallus.
In the US applied also to “a domestic duck or turkey”! The opposite of that is generalization, when there is a widening of meaning.
THE OED tells us that the word check had the original sense of `man in a religious order, cleric, clergyman'.
As the scholarship of the Middle Ages has practically limited to the clergy, and these performed all the writing, notarial and secretarial work of the time, the name `derk' came to be equivalent to `scholar', and specially applicable to a notary, secretary, recorder, accountant¸ or penman.
The last has now came to be the ordinary sense, all the others being either archaic, historical, formal or contextual.
In AmE, its use has extended further to include a shop or hotel worker.
... zobacz całą notatkę