The New York Yankees, my favorite team, won the American League Championship Series on Saturday and are therefore heading to the World Series. As right fielder Juan Soto caught the final out that sent them to the World Series, the announcer proclaimed that the Yankees had won the pennant for the first time in 15 years. What the hell is a pennant?
Being the avid baseball fan that I am, I know that winning a pennant means winning the championship series of the league, either in the American League or the National League, advancing them to the World Series where the champions of both leagues face off in a best of seven series. Failing to beat the weird-baseball-kid language-nerd combo, however, I knew I had to figure out what a pennant is, where that word comes from and why we use it in this context.
According to Wikipedia, a pennant is a “commemorative pennon typically used to show support for a particular athletic team.” Of course, I then had to look up pennon which is apparently “a long narrow flag which is larger at the hoist than at the fly, i.e., the flag narrows as it moves away from the flagpole.” Essentially, this word “pennant” went from referring to a commemorative, abnormal flag to meaning the champion of the American or National League in any particular season. When some hear the word “pennant,” they may only recognize the baseball-facing meaning without any knowledge of the flag that the term came from.
I found this whole situation to be an interesting example of semantic narrowing. Semantic narrowing is a semantic change that occurs when the meaning of a word or phrase becomes less general or inclusive over time. I was thinking about semantic narrowing at the same time as the Yankees clinched their world series berth thanks to semantic narrowing being the subject of the most recent episode of “Lexicon Valley” — the podcast of John McWhorter, associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. Again, not disproving any allegations.
Another common example of semantic narrowing in English is the word “corn.” Corn is an indigenous Germanic word that used to mean all types of grains but has narrowed to the type of Central American cereal plant that yields large grains set in rows on a cob, or “maize.” Even the word “indigenous” is undergoing a kind of semantic narrowing right now. The way I used it above to mean “originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native” is certainly still acceptable. But the word nowadays is commonly used to refer to “people inhabiting or existing in a land from the before the arrival of colonists.” Both examples of semantic narrowing reflect historical and cultural changes that influence both the way we speak and the meanings of the words we use in everyday life.
Semantic narrowing fascinates me not only because it’s a cool linguistic phenomenon that shows up in situations from baseball to history classes, but also because it reflects the plasticity of language and how closely it’s bound to the lived world. All living languages will continue to bend to the changes in society, giving us countless new examples of semantic narrowing, semantic widening, syntactic change and sound change. Language shift is the result of a language being spoken by different people in changing contexts across that world — and that’s beautiful.
