by John McWhorter

If a Martian asked you what sacrifice meant, you would likely say that it means "to do without something." That's the meaning that Jim Lehrer and President Bush intended in an interview in January about the Iraq war. Lehrer asked "Why have you not asked more Americans to sacrifice something?" Bush replied "Well, you know, I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night." We can't help thinking about the fact that the people in said images are so often sacrificing their very lives. And in fact, the word sacrifice first meant to kill a person or animal as an offering to the Gods. We know that meaning, but these days it's secondary--your first impulse in answering the Martian would not be to say that sacrifice means to slaughter a goat on a rock. A medieval English speaker would have answered something like that. But words change. If you sacrifice something, you are giving it up and doing without it. After a while, the giving up and doing without became the main thing you meant by sacrificing, rather than the ugly experience of that which was sacrificed. Pretty soon you could talk about sacrifice as a matter of watching something unpleasant on TV. Any language is shot through with words that lost their spunk like that. At 41 I am old enough to remember when awesome referred to something truly spectacular like a comet or a president resigning. Since then, people say "Awesome!" when they get to the station right when the subway arrives. In the same way, in Old English, the words for sacrifice still reeked of the violence that Beowulf is full of. To make sacrifices was to bleed, or there was another word that probably traced back to an earlier word meaning to lay something out--that is, in order to be drained of blood and life. The word sacrifice trickled into the language from French, and even though it first meant "to kill as an offering," it was still euphemistic in its way: It came from a Latin word meaning "to make blessed," detracting from the fact that said blessed entity was to be laid out on a rock and bled to death. Sacrifice then lost more force over time, like awesome, so that now we talk of sacrificing eating out rather than children. There is nothing unique about English in this. In many languages, the word for sacrifice is still the same as the word for victim, calling to mind the poor goat. For Germans, to make sacrifices is to bring victimhood upon oneself, Opfer bringen. And yet they readily use that expression to refer to giving up peace of mind and other comforts, including in media translations of Bush's statement. It's not that Germans can't process the difference between bleeding their sons on a rock and giving up their skiing vacations in a tight year. It's that in all languages, over time words' meanings dilute. First you sacrifice a person, after a while you sacrifice your yoga classes. Sometimes, the way words change can be kind of fun. Before I wrote that last sentence, I went to sit in bed for a spell with my wife while she was reading. I told her I was just touching base. She said "So, want to touch my base?" and directed my hand to a playful, passing encounter with, well ... base once meant only the bottom of something. She brought me back to the ancient meaning of the word. Fun. But in other cases, the way words change shows how we humans can become numb to ugly realities. Black men are now using the N-word to call one another "buddy" when the word started as a hideous slur used against them by whites. In the same way, we hear talk of sacrificing our precious peace of mind when back in the day, we would only have been able to use sacrifice to refer to the more urgent sacrifice at present, in which we offer our sons and daughters to bleed and die in the name of abstract principles. It's the kind of thing that makes it a task to acknowledge that history means progress.