DOPE as a college student slang term, 1

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:42 AM -0500 3/8/05, David Bowie wrote:
>From:    Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM>
>: Connie Eble reports:
>
>:: I'll ask my students. But my feeling is that dope is used today as
>:: much as an evaluative term ('good', 'excellent') as to refer to
>:: drugs. I've been collecting dank for marijuana for the past couple
>:: of years.
>
>: Connie is undoubtedly right.  But the existence of "dope" adj. may
>: create additional discord.
>
>*But*--why in the world would such homonymy create discord? I mean, if
>two words have closely related but different meanings, i can see how
>they'd interfere ('cleave' and 'cleave', to take an extreme example, or
>even 'dope' /soft drink/ and 'dope' /drugs/, since they're both
>consumables), but language seems to do fine with hononyms that mean very
>different things (as in 'lead' /give direction/ and 'lead' /metal/,

maybe "cape" (promontory vs. cloak) is a better example, since the
two "lead"s are only homographs, not homonyms

>  or
>presumably 'dope' /soft drink/ and 'dope' /excellent/).
>
Yours is indeed the standard view (for good reason) within homonymy
avoidance research, including a very useful book by Edna Rees
Williams, _The Avoidance of Homonyms in English_ (Yale U. Press,
1944), that includes the observation that "Only when the words are
alike in sound, when they are in common use in the same social and
intellectual circles, when they perform the same syntactical
functions in the language, within the same sphere of ideas, do they
become subject to mutual confusion and conflict." The cases involving
homonymically inspired word (or sense) loss are typically of this
type, like Gilliéron's famous _gat_ ('rooster' vs. 'cat") case in SW
France, _let_ ('allow'/ 'hinder'), _queen_ 'sovereign' vs. _quean_
'harlot', _strait_/_straight_, _pale_ 'shovel'/pail, _an ear_ vs. _a
neer_ 'kidney', etc.  In cases of taboo avoidance, we seem to extend
the boundaries of what counts as closely related, whence the downfall
of "cock", "ass", "coney", etc.--and, more recently, even "niggardly".

Then of course there are those (typically evaluative) cases in which
homonymy is exploited, and confusion is courted rather than
avoided--"bad", "stupid", perhaps "gay".

larry