Lexicon Valley The Sound of a Car Backshifting
18 snips
Mar 24, 2026 A romp through word histories and how meanings shift over time. A look at wit’s original sense of knowledge and its survival in strange compounds. Old recordings reveal how automobile shrank into auto and car. Playful takes on redundancy in language and how extra words can be meaningful or comic.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Wit Once Meant Knowledge
- The word wit originally meant knowledge, not humor, coming from Old English witten and related to German wissen.
- John McWhorter illustrates with Shakespeare lines (Love's Labour's Lost) where wit contrasts with wise to mean learnedness, not comedic cleverness.
Shakespeare's Wit Is Often Misread
- Shakespeare routinely used wit in its older sense, so modern audiences often misinterpret lines as being comic when they mean knowledge or reason.
- Examples: Olivia in Twelfth Night's "nor wit nor reason can my passion hide" actually means neither knowledge nor reason can hide her passion.
Dinner at Eight Demonstrates Old Wit Usage
- John McWhorter plays a clip from Dinner at Eight (1933) where Jean Harlow calls her maid a "nitwit," demonstrating older uses of wit as ignorance.
- The clip highlights familiar period usage where nitwit means dummy, not lack of joking skill.
