My custom is...

Some time ago I read a note that a new film based on Conan Doyle’s story “The Hound of the Baskervilles” was shot in England. The novelty lies in the fact that this film should destroy all the myths created around Sherlock Holmes and show “everything as it really happened.” The author of the note further explains: “So, Sherlock will not wear his usual cap and will not smoke a pipe. Conan Doyle didn’t write this, says BBC News and the filmmakers.” The word peculiar is used here strangely - not to say peculiar. Actually, this word means “peculiar, original,” but here it means “your usual.” This kind of usage has started to happen all the time lately. Here are the phrases I found on the Internet: Despite my usual laziness, I promise to change my password regularly; I would be disappointed if he forgot even for a moment about his breed and changed his usual behavior; Vasily was sitting in his usual place; In modern Russia, “giving a bribe” in the original sense of the term is almost impossible. And there’s as much of this as you like. Use of this type has already assumed the character of an epidemic.

This happens when a word or some of its old meaning is destroyed right before our eyes, as happened with the word dovlet. We can say that its original meaning - to be sufficient - has practically died. But the shell of the word itself remained, only filled with different content. The word was rethought on the basis of consonances: prevails - pressure, crushes, suppresses. And it also weighs heavily, hence the new management: it weighs on. Well, there, the Monument dominates the square. Or here's another: Growing unemployment is the biggest concern among residents of large Lithuanian cities, according to a survey conducted by the weekly Veidas. Its results show that the fear of losing a job weighs heavily on every third Lithuanian (31.7%).

But let's get back to the unusual hat. Similar uses of the word peculiar have been encountered before. Thus, the Strugatsky brothers constantly use this word in the sense of “ordinary” or “their usual”: He was wearing an unusual cotton quilt; without any prefaces or peculiar jokes in such cases, etc. By the way, I think that many intelligent people learned this use of the word peculiar from the Strugatsky novels. However, this mistake was encountered even earlier - let’s say, the writer Leonid Leonov used this word in exactly the same way: he in his usual way ran into the hallway , etc.

The reason for what happened to the word peculiar is quite clear. It has lost its, as linguists say, internal form. The fact is that the word custom previously had not only a modern meaning (tradition), but also a meaning - behavior, manner of behavior. Let us remember Pushkin, “The Tale of the Dead Princess”: Month, month, my friend, / Gilded horn! / You rise in deep darkness, / Round-faced, bright-eyed, / And, loving your custom, / The stars look at you. So in Karamzin’s “History of the Russian State” we read: The Polyans were more educated than others, meek and quiet in custom; modesty adorned their wives. It is with this meaning of the word custom that the meaning of the derivative word peculiar is connected . Therefore, now the meaning of the word original is no longer derived from the meaning of the words from which it is derived.

One more circumstance must be taken into account here. The word peculiar is not very frequent and stylistically marked. This is a bookish word, with a touch of literature. It is no coincidence that Dovlatov has such a character in various works - a sublimely cutesy editor who uses this word: The editor lowered her eyes full of tears: - This is so peculiar... Or: I went to the publishing house. “The review is quite unusual,” she whispered.

When a word is infrequently used in a language, and moreover, its meaning is not supported by its internal form, this meaning is lost. But the word remains, and it often happens that people begin to attribute a different meaning to it. Indeed, here is the word peculiar - if you don’t know what it really means, how can you decide that it means yours + ordinary?