Wordwatch: Carnage

Back in December, I read in a news bulletin that a typhoon in the Philippines had caused “complete carnage”: “homes, hospitals and schools had been ripped to shreds, crops had been wiped out and villages flooded”.

Here is a strange, yet I suppose predictable, evolution of a word that used to have a very specific meaning. The long-established meaning of “carnage” referred to a heap of dead bodies, as for instance after a battle. But somewhere in the recent past, its association with destruction has overtaken the literal meaning, and any sort of damage has come to be described as “carnage”. It’s quite possible that the typhoon in the Philippines did indeed occasion human casualties, but the passage I’ve quoted seems clearly to imply damage only to property, not loss of life.

I can give an approximate date to the shift, as I remember being struck by the new implications of the word when in 2010 I read, in the Wandsworth Guardian, a report of a serious house fire in which no lives were lost: “It was carnage in there”, said a witness.

Do we care?  Once again, it’s a question of how much we value the sense of the words we’re using. I for one think this is an important issue. Words will change their meaning whether we like it or not, and they will, as a rule, do so as a consequence of general ignorance, not because highly literate people have detected new uses for those words. How many modern meanings can we attribute to the conscious decisions of professional writers to stretch a word or a phrase to embrace a new idea?

Poets, whose lives are spent using words in newly invigorated ways, rarely endow a given word with a new meaning. They may occasionally invent a new phrase – a short passage that becomes part of our language as “a quotation”. A familiar instance is Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night.”

Shakespeare is well known for having introduced several new words to the language: that is, words that have stayed with us and entered general circulation (quite apart from the innumerable quotations that originate in his works). But not many poets are Shakespeare.

Let’s examine what “carnage” actually means. It was a word known in Shakespeare’s time, derived from the Italian “carnaggio”, but not much used. The O.E.D. records that it had a technical and very specific sense, referring to the “flesh-meat offered to a feudal lord.” By the eighteenth century, it had already undergone a radical change of meaning and was in more regular use. It had come to mean “the slaughter of a great number (especially of men); butchery, massacre”.

In all these contexts, the association with meat, raw and recently slaughtered, is a constant, and increasingly the meat is human. In his great history of the French Revolution, published in 1837, Thomas Carlyle wrote ironically of “One of those carnage-fields, such as you read of by the name “Glorious Victory”.’ Contrast these quotations with the one that startled me in 2010 to see just how far the meaning has shifted. I’d say that this was not a gradual shift or evolution of meaning, but a sudden new incarnation of the word.

As it happens, “incarnation” provides the clue to the problem. It incorporates the “carn” root that it shares with both “carnage” and “carnal”, denoting “flesh”, from the Latin “caro” and its genitive inflection “carnis”. “Incarnation” means ‘becoming or taking on flesh’ (most usually in the context of Christ’s birth on earth).

Shakespeare (since we’ve mentioned him) supplies a good example of the use of “carnal”: in the closing moments of Hamlet, Horatio tells Fortinbras and the English Ambassadors who have arrived just after the deaths of the Prince, and of his mother and step-father, Gertrude and Claudius:

“… let me speak to th’yet unknowing world 

How these things came about. So shall you hear

Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts,

Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters …”  

Certainly the stage at the end of Hamlet, littered with corpses, presents a disordered, chaotic scene. It’s easy enough to see how the change occurred, and it follows a pattern very common now: a word with an accepted meaning but slightly on the margins of common use is picked up on grounds of appearance or sound – very often because it carries more learned overtones – and applied more or less by chance to a new context endowing it with a completely new meaning.

In many cases, I’d say this hardly mattered, but here is an example of a word with a strong and very specific meaning now muddled and deprived of all its power.