Draft by Mark Liberman
From the post:
In a series of Language Log posts, Geoff Pullum has called attention to the prevalence of polysemy and ambiguity:
The people who think clarity involves lack of ambiguity, so we have to strive to eliminate all multiple meanings and should never let a word develop a new sense… they simply don’t get it about how language works, do they?
Languages love multiple meanings. They lust after them. They roll around in them like a dog in fresh grass.
The other day, as I reading a discussion in our comments about whether English draftable does or doesn’t refer to the same concept as Finnish asevelvollisuus (“obligation to serve in the military”), I happened to be sitting in a current of uncomfortably cold air. So of course I wondered how the English word draft came to refer to military conscription as well as air flow. And a few seconds of thought brought to mind several others senses of the the noun draft and its associated verb. I figured that this must represent a confusion of several originally separate words. But then I looked it up.
If you like language and have an appreciation for polsemy and ambiguity, you will enjoy this post a lot.