Learned is a weekly newsletter about words and language, written by me, and published every Monday. If you're interested in getting each week's letter delivered straight to your inbox, you can sign up for free right here: http://learned.substack.com Thanks!

This week's issue is all about the phrase "Jack of All Trades, Master of None." The following is an excerpt from a section of the newsletter called "sidetracks" where I put a few interesting links and thoughts that didn't quite fit in the main article.

One question that came up repeatedly in all my reading about “Jack of All Trades” was, why Jack? The most common explanations seemed to be that jack often just meant man or person and that, over time, the phrase became degraded so that man became man with low status. Eventually, man with low status became equated to thing, so that jack was now a catch-all word for small, unimportant item.

This kind of linguistic entropy fascinates me. We see this all over the place in English so that something that once had a common, everyday meaning has become something uglier or more spiteful. Bitch, for example, has gone from a basic term of animal husbandry to, well, you know.

This isn’t unique to English, either. In Japanese, the word kisama has changed from you to you son of a bitch. Written with the characters for lord (as in, person ranking higher than oneself) and the polite suffix (often translated as honored as in honored customer, etc.), the meaning has changed from being a very polite way of addressing someone to, well, the exact opposite.

And, speaking of opposites, we see a lot of that in English as well - words that used to be offensive and are now everything from silly to inane to positive. Golly, for example, used to be blasphemous, scumbag used to mean a used condom, and wicked used to mean, er, wicked.