Why doesn't artful mean “full of art?”
I don't even remember how the subject came up. What I do remember is that there was a discussion about teaching word formation patterns and how impossible it is due to the many, many exceptions.
So, let's back up. When teaching ESL one of the skills we try to impart is that of identifying parts of words. We start with the simpler, more common prefixes: re~ means again, tri~ means three, ex~ means former, and so on1. Then we move into suffixes: ~er means someone who does something, ~ness is the state or quality of something, and ~ful means that something is, uhm, full of...something else. Naturally, it's the root words that come in and screw everything up.
Let's talk about ~ful some more. Here's Etymonline for the full breakdown:
word-forming element attached to nouns (and in modern English to verb stems) and meaning "full of, having, characterized by," also "amount or volume contained" (handful, bellyful); from Old English -full, -ful, which is full (adj.) become a suffix by being coalesced with a preceding noun, but originally a separate word.
It goes on like that for a bit, but you get the idea. ~ful literally means full. We can add to Etymonline's examples of handful and bellyful with a ton of everyday vocabulary and we can generally teach it to ESL students with a handy mnemonic device: beautiful means full of beauty, stressful means full of stress, flavorful2 means full of flavor. So far, so good.
And then you get a word like artful, which, unfortunately does not mean full of art3. Well, except it does, kinda.
Here's Merriam-Webster on artful:
1: performed with or showing art or skill - an artful performance on the violin
2a: using or characterized by art and skill : DEXTEROUS - an artful prose stylist
b: adroit in attaining an end usually by insinuating or indirect means : WILY - an artful cross-examiner
3: ARTIFICIAL - trim walks and artful bowers—William Wordsworth
And just to keep our sources consistent, here's Merriam-Webster's list of synonyms for artful:
cunning, cute, subtle, deceptive, slick, fraudulent, dishonest, crafty, beguiling, shrewd, sly...
The list goes on for a while. But right away we can see that we're not seeing anything in either the definitions or the synonyms that would support the idea that artful means full of art. We could say, using the definitions above, that artful means full of skill, full of cunning, full of deception, and so on. But full of creativity? Not so much.
It is, of course, for a very simple reason. Here's our same dictionary's definition of art:
the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects
Well. Actually, that's the fourth listed definition of art. The first three all center around art as skill or learning. Which makes sense. Art is an old word4. It goes all the way back to the 13th century in English alone, and much earlier when you start digging into its roots in other languages. And across all those centuries, it's retained its sense of skill or learning. Which is where the matter would rest if it wasn't for those pesky artists.
Artist, much like art, spent centuries as a term denoting someone's skill in creating rather than simply someone who creates art. Artists created works of art explicitly to teach and instruct. But then, in the late 1800s, some artists decided that it was enough for art to simply exist as something beautiful in the world. It did not need a sense of purpose. They called their idea the Aesthetic Movement and coined the phrase, "art for art's sake," which Oxford's Dictionary of Word Origins describes as: "The phrase...conveys the idea that the chief or only aim of a work of art is the self-expression of the artist who creates it."
So here we are in the nineteenth century with this brand new usage of the word art to explain a deliberate act of creativity for the sole purpose of being creative. Unfortunately, our word artful can't quite cope with this new definition. It's been around too long and seen too much.
Here's Etymonline again:
1610s, "learned, well-versed in the (liberal) arts," also "characterized by technical skill, artistic," from art (n.) + -ful. The meaning "cunning, crafty, skilled in adapting means to ends" is from 1739.
So we end up back where we started: why doesn't artful mean full of art? It does, just not in the way we think it should. English. What are you gonna do?
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You Can’t Go Home Again
by Thomas Wolfe
As I mentioned in an Also newsletter, I spent a lot of time on my summer vacation looking for this book and never finding it. I finally broke down and bought a digital edition. I have thoughts, but nothing really to share yet. Here’s the description from the listing on Bookshop.org:
George Webber has written a successful novel about his family and hometown. When he returns to that town he is shaken by the force of the outrage and hatred that greets him. Family and friends feel naked and exposed by the truths they have seen in his book, and their fury drives him from his home. He begins a search for his own identity that takes him to New York and a hectic social whirl; to Paris with an uninhibited group of expatriates; to Berlin, lying cold and sinister under Hitler's shadow. At last Webber returns to America and rediscovers it with love, sorrow, and hope.
We save the really fun stuff like, why do both uni and mono mean one and why is it that im, in, and un are all negatives? for the advanced classes.
Unlike flavortown which means "what the hell just happened, where are my clothes, and where are we exactly?"
We run into the same issue with words like awful - awe was originally a peaceful, serene feeling but then we started to associate it with things that are unimaginably greater than ourselves and the associated feelings of terror and reverence and, lo and behold, awful becomes less "full of amazement" and more "full of terror."
Interestingly, my copy of The Oxford Concise Dictionary of English Etymology defines art simply as "were."