After eight issues of hardcore linguistic analysis of words that, by the power of transference, irritate the hell out of me, it’s time to do that most sacred of things: break time. Wait, no, that's not it...
In this volume of Learned, we've critiqued the words through which institutional authority gets created, enforced, and internalized. And we've learned that, although I love teaching, I hold academic institutions in less than a perfect light. But eight issues of anything can be exhausting, so this week we're taking a recess break.
The word "break" fascinates me. It's an old word and normally, in English, when we see a very old word we can assume that the word has acquired a wealth of disparate meanings. Break is not really an exception, except it is. Break can be traced back to Old English where it was imported directly from Old German. Old, in this case, means sometime before the Normans made a conquest of merry olde England in 1066.
So, over the past 1,000 or so years, give or take a century, the Old English word brecan has retained its principle meaning of "to violently separate into smaller parts." And while it has, indeed, added a few meanings, at its base, break still means to separate things into smaller parts, often violently. And yet...
After the Norman Conquest, Old English transitioned into Middle English. As it did so, its verbs began to lose inflection. In layman's terms, Old English verbs did the heavy lifting of a sentence by changing their shape to reflect who was doing what to whom. In a pair of sentences like "Dog bites man" and "man bites dog," Old English would give us the action by altering the verb. However, under the new order of things, verbs began to be paired with prepositions like in and on to differentiate use cases.
In other words, the Old English, onbrecan changes, eventually, to break in. As this linguistic change takes root across the entirety of the English language over the next few centuries, prepositional verbs begin to lose their literal meanings, instead acquiring various and sundry metaphorical meanings that may have made sense at one time but now, well, case by case.
Take, for example, the phrase, "pick up the phone." Right now that's a phrasal verb masquerading as a prepositional verb. To break that down just a bit - in a prepositional verb, the particle (on, in, etc.) functions like a true preposition and tells us the direction of the action. In a phrasal verb, the particle acts more like an adverb, telling us how the action is being done. So, for a phrasal verb like "eat up" we're not hearing "up" as a rise or life but as completion. Same thing with "pick up the phone."
Originally "up" may have indicated direction: lift the handset to your ear. These days though, arguably, the combination of "pick up" has less to do with lifting than it does with answering. If I say, "I called Scott on Zoom but he didn't pick up," you wouldn't imagine that Scott was lifting his entire computer to his face. Well, maybe you would. Hell, maybe Scott would. Maybe he's just that kind of guy.
The point is, break went through the same semantic broadening that any other 1,000 year old word would, it just did it in a slightly different way. Instead of changing the meaning of "break," English just added particles to the end and said, "that'll do, Pig." (I don't know why a 1,500 year old language would make a reference to the 1995 family film, Babe, but hey, there are lots of things I don't know.)
Now, break is no one-trick piggy. Instead, break decided to continue its semantic broadening by acting transitively against an object, e.g. "break ground," or grabbing an odd noun and forming an idiomatic pair, like "break wind." At the same time, while all this verbing was verbing every which way but loose, break decided to go ahead and become a noun as well. Which brings us back to breaking time. Or, rather, how taking a break became break time.
Break began its career as a noun almost immediately after that whole Norman fiasco. It started out mirroring its verb form, describing things that were once whole and were now not. From there it got busy grabbing metaphors off the shelf and adapting itself to various concepts until, sometime shortly after the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, a breaking of working time into distinct sections became distilled into the simple compound "break time."
And “break time” is another word for recess, something absolutely necessary in any school day. I hope you've enjoyed this one. We'll be back next issue with a look at some of the people and the roles they play in academia. Until then,
Stay curious,
Joel