Grammar Girl here, I'm in Yon Fog, your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

Today we'll talk about the words we use to refer to dogs,

a writing concept called the audience of one,

your comments about the medial S and more, and finally a familect story about a footbridge.

Dogs may be man's best friend, but how did the word itself go from a term for our furry

canine friends to a word for everything from our feet to a type of meat we put on a bun.

Well, first, words have a natural tendency

to shift and morph in meaning over time

as they get used in different contexts.

And they take on other subtle shades of meaning related to their original sense.

Take the word silly for example.

In old English times, Silly meant blessed.

Since those who are pious or blessed are often looked at as fairly innocent,

the meaning of the word took on a sense of hapless innocence.

It didn't take long for people to start to pity those hapless innocent fools,

and voila, the word shifted once more to its current meaning. Likewise, the word dog in English has changed meanings

likewise the word dog in English has changed meanings over the course of its history.

But before we get into the different ways that Dog has shifted, we first have to figure out where

the word even came from, as that is a bit of an etymology mystery.

We find some traces of the word in Old English, mainly as Daja, but there were very few examples

of its use in writing before Middle English, where it became Doji, Dogege E.

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