fraught

Mon Jun 22 18:37:44 UTC 2009

Jan Freeman wrote a column about "fraught" in 2002. It's now behind a pay
wall at the Boston Globe's website, so she pasted it into a message to me a
few months ago. With her permission, I'm pasting it here below the
signature. The column came up in response to my observation in an email,
"You never hear of something 'fraught with benefits' or the like (unless you
go to the OED and find this citation from 1755: 'Liberty, fraught with
blessings as it is, when unabused, has, perhaps, been abused to our
destruction')." I've personally noticed unaccompanied "fraught" to mean
loaded with danger or tension in Entertainment Weekly several times.

Neal Whitman
Email: nwhitman at ameritech.net
Blog: http://literalminded.wordpress.com

Author(s):    JAN FREEMAN Date: August 18, 2002 Page: D2 Section: Focus

``LAST SUNDAY, A GLOBE BOOK REVIEW REFERRED TO A FAMILY'S `FRAUGHT ESCAPE TO
THE UNITED STATES' - A USAGE I'VE BEEN SEEING MORE OFTEN. MY DICTIONARY
DEFINES ONLY FRAUGHT WITH, NOT THE WORD ALONE. FRAUGHT IS EVIDENTLY LADEN OR
BURDENED IN THE METAPHORICAL SENSE. THUS YOUR ESCAPE CAN BE FRAUGHT WITH
DANGER OR YOUR LIFE FRAUGHT WITH DESPAIR, BUT YOU CAN'T HAVE A FRAUGHT
ESCAPE - UNLESS IT'S ON A FREIGHTER.'' - SUE BASS, BELMONT

Fraught is indeed now making solo appearances, and your dictionary may
disapprove. But few enterprises are more fraught with peril than trying to
fence in language, and it's way too late to lock the gate on this one. In
fact, though fraught with remains the dominant form, fraught on its own is
not entirely new. When to fraught was still a verb in its own right - as you
noted, it's a variant of to freight - its past participle occasionally
showed up alone, meaning simply loaded: The OED, for instance, has "full
fraughted to the brink" (1563) and "vessels that lay fraught for the
straits" (1666) among its citations.

But the verb fraught was jettisoned centuries ago, leaving us only the
participial adjective we find in phrases like "fraught with danger." And as
fraught increased its figurative range, fraught with became the usual
expression. You didn't necessarily have to say what a fraught ship was
carrying, but when it came to a fraught heart or a fraught enterprise, the
metaphorical cargo - grief, pain, adversity - needed a name.

Sometimes that load was desirable - charity, wisdom, riches - but the weight
of fraught has always bent it toward negative connotations, toward
"burdened" rather than "blessed." And most of us, speakers of 20th- and
21st-century English, have grown accustomed to phrases of the
fraught-with-peril type.

That dominance made it possible for fraught to start dropping the with and
step out, in the 1960s, unescorted. Once we all assumed being fraught was an
unpleasant thing, we could use it to mean "troubled" or "distressing"
without having to specify the problem.

A look at fraught's semantic cousins reveals similar behavior. What's a
pregnant pause pregnant with? Some kind of meaning, but context is the only
clue. A grave situation is serious (grave shares a Latin root with gravid,
meaning "pregnant, burdened"), but grave itself is no more specific than
fraught. Weighty utterances? Loaded language? All these figurative uses are
grounded in the consensus that "heavy" equals "serious," as it always has in
English - long before the flower-child heyday of "Man, that's heavy stuff."

My unscientific observation is that changes like this often begin as
jocularities: "I just can't cope," condemned by Strunk & White in 1979, must
have originated with a working woman whose friends didn't need to be told
what she despaired of coping with. "Their relationship is very . . .
fraught" would have had, at first, some nonverbal annotation - a raised
eyebrow, a knowing look. Once the new sense is familiar, it can drop the
nods and winks - and presto, a new fraught is in the dictionary, right there
between fraudulent and Fraulein.

Fraught has moved particularly fast, it's true. Nowadays, journalists use
fraught rather than fraught with about one time in seven; two decades ago,
it was more like one in 70. Still, most current dictionaries give it an
unconditional endorsement. So even if you have a fraught attitude toward
language innovations, don't let this one weigh on you.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Wilson Gray" <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Monday, June 22, 2009 11:22 AM
Subject: Re: fraught

> ---------------------- Information from the mail
> header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: fraught
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> It's been around among the chattering classes for several years, but,
> heretofore, apparently, not among the academic classes.
>
> IME it's older than "Oh, snap!" Though simple 'fraught" in place of
> the, e.g. cliched, "fraught with danger," is somewhat less hip, of
> course.
>
> -Wilson
>
> On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 10:53 AM, Jonathan
> Lighter<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail
>> header -----------------------
>> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: fraught
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Maybe, Charlie, but I think it amounts to the same thing.
>>
>> Anyway, they're using it a lot: I've seen it in the _New Yorker_ and
>> heard
>> it on CNN.
>> New to me.
>>
>> JL
>> On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 10:04 AM, Charles Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>> -----------------------
>>> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
>>> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: fraught
>>>
>>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>> Maybe rather than being elliptical for the idiomatic phrase, the use of
>>> "fraught" just recovers the older sense of 'freighted' ('burdened' or
>>> 'carrying baggage')?
>>>
>>> --Charlie
>>> _____________________________________________________________
>>>
>>> ---- Original message ----
>>> >Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 08:59:13 -0400
>>> >From: Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
>>> >Subject: fraught
>>> >
>>> >I can't find it in the Archives. Â Short for "fraught with difficulties
>>> >or
>>> complications." Here's an ex. from a learned colleague:
>>> >
>>> >2009 Brian Boyd _On the Origin of Stories_ (Cambridge: Belknap) 56: If
>>> cooperation is is fairly easy to establish, yet already fraught, among
>>> close
>>> kin, how can it extend even among non-kin?
>>> >
>>> >No earlier instance of "fraught" in the book. Â My impression is that
>>> >it's
>>> becoming a bit faddish in the media.
>>> >
>>> >JL
>>>
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>>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> -Wilson
> â?"â?"â?"
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -----
> -Mark Twain
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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