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Elements of English vocabulary
by Jonathan Marks

• Introduction
• Cast – a throwback to the 12th century
• Casting around for a cast-iron alibi
• Casting light on obscure idioms
• Broadcasting and narrowcasting
• Sky overcast? Don't be downcast!

Introduction

This article will take a common English morpheme and explore where it appears in the English lexicon – in compounds, derivatives and phrases – and how its form(s) and meaning(s) have developed and extended. The aim is to foster vocabulary development by drawing attention to links between apparently disconnected items and showing that English vocabulary is somewhat more unified and systematic than might appear.

Cast – a throwback to the 12th century

The verb cast, meaning 'throw', dates from the 12th century. The original infinitive was casten, an anglicised form of the Old Norse kasta, which also survives in the modern Scandinavian languages. As a freely-collocating verb with this literal meaning, cast is now rather old-fashioned and literary; it’s associated, for example, with the language of the King James Bible (1611): ‘Hee that is without sinne among you, let him first cast a stone at her’. But it's still commonly used in certain collocations, with mostly metaphorical meanings.

You can cast (or ‘throw’) a look/glance at someone. You can cast your eyes around a room, or cast an eye over something. (In a similar way, you catch someone's eye if you get their attention by looking at them.)

You can cast doubt on something or cast suspicion on something / someone. If you cast aspersions on someone, you attack them verbally or in writing.

If you manage to stop thinking about something that has been weighing on your mind, you cast it from your mind, and you can cast your mind back to events and situations in the past. (Rather similarly, a throwback is a reversion to an earlier type or technique; you might describe a style of music as ‘a throwback to the ’60s’.) If you cast aside old ideas, preconceptions or fears, you get rid of them.

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Casting around for a cast-iron alibi

The literal meaning of cast is still current in fishing: you cast your rod / net into the water. In a metaphorical extension of this, if you wanted to develop a general theory about language you'd be well advised to cast your net wide, i.e. to gather evidence from a large number of languages. You'd also need to cast around / about for evidence to support your arguments.

To cast also means to make an object by running a molten substance such as a metal into a mould, and leaving it to cool and become solid; a sculpture can be cast in bronze, for example. Hence the noun cast iron, the strength and solidity of which has developed its own idiomatic extensions: someone with a cast-iron stomach can eat absolutely anything, and a cast-iron guarantee is one that can be trusted completely.

Some animals, such as snakes, cast their old skin as part of their growth, and if you wear someone else's cast-offs, you wear old clothes that they have finished using. This use of cast also explains the saying Cast ne'er a clout till May be out: a clout is a ‘clothe’ (singular!) and the saying means you shouldn't stop wearing your warm winter clothes before the end of May.

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Casting light on obscure idioms

Cast (and ‘throw’) are used in connection with light and darkness, both literally and figuratively – e.g. cast (new / fresh) light on something, cast a shadow over something. Another collocation which is mostly figurative but can also be used literally is to cast a spell on / over someone.

In an election, you cast a vote, but the term casting vote is from an old use of cast, meaning to tip a scale or balance one way or the other.

The basic meaning of cast as 'throw' explains two apparently obscure idioms. The die is cast means there's no going back from an important event, or an important decision that has been made. A ‘die’ is an old singular form of ‘dice’; once the dice has been thrown, there's no way of changing the score it shows.

If you cast pearls before swine, you offer something valuable to someone who won't be able to appreciate it. ‘Swine’ is an old word for ‘pig(s)’, so a modern recast would be 'throw pearls in front of pigs'. (The idiom is almost exactly the same in Swedish: kasta pärlor för svin.)

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Broadcasting and narrowcasting

From the mid-13th century, cast was also used as a noun, originally meaning the form into which a thing was thrown, such as an arrangement, plan, design, bearing or appearance, and later more generally a type, quality, or style; in other words, it already had a metaphorical meaning. The literal meaning is seen in metal casting (see above), in the cast put on a fractured limb while it heals, and in the mould used to make cast objects, such as the plaster cast of a face – i.e. it can mean both an object made in a mould and the mould itself. The metaphorical meaning survives in such uses as men of a military cast of mind. The meaning of 'a set of performers in a play or film' – such as an all-star cast – also derives from the sense of 'plan' or 'design', and is the most familiar use of cast nowadays. If actors are cast (verb) in unsuitable roles, they are miscast, and if they are continually cast as the same type of character, they can become typecast, i.e. closely identified with that type of role. And it's not only actors that can be typecast; for example, pupils can be typecast by their teachers – fairly or unfairly – as lazy, untalented, unacademic and so on.

Broadcast was originally an agricultural word, referring to scattering seed by hand. The meaning was then extended to the dissemination of intangible things such as beliefs and information, and thence to its familiar use in the context of radio and television. More recently, narrowcasting has been used to mean transmission to an audience which is known to be limited, either because not everyone has the technology needed to see / hear the programmes, or simply because the content is too specialised to be of wide interest. When the legendary DJ John Peel died, his colleague Andy Kershaw paid tribute by using broadcast and narrowcast in a slightly different sense: ‘He was a broadcaster, not a narrowcaster’. Peel was of a course a broadcaster in the normal sense of the word, but the contrast between ‘broad’ and ‘narrow’ here highlights the eclectic range of music he played.

Also familiar from TV and radio is the weather forecast; this word originally meant something planned or contrived in advance. In other fields, such as economics, a forecast can also be called a projection – the Latin elements ‘pro’ and ‘ject’ mean ‘forward’ and ‘throw’, just like ‘fore’ and ‘cast’.

Two other types of broadcast are a newscast and a sportscast, and nowadays we also have simulcast, podcast and webcast.

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Sky overcast? Don't be downcast!

A castaway is someone who fate has thrown onto a desert island after a shipwreck, and an outcast has been thrown out of society, or a social group. Either of them might have good reason to feel deeply unhappy or downcast – or its Latinate equivalent ‘dejected’; de =down, ject =throw. Meanwhile, if the weather is overcast, it's dull and cloudy – as if a blanket of cloud has been thrown over the sky, perhaps.

Old English cast has various other meanings, including a squint, an animal unable to get up after a fall, and a group of crabs!

The element cast also appears in a number of words related not to any of the above, but to the Latin adjective castus, whose meaning developed from 'cut (off)', to 'separate' and thence to 'uncontaminated, pure'. This group includes caste, castle, castigate, castrate, incest, chaste, chastise and chateau – words which retain various elements of the meanings of ‘cut-offness’, ‘separateness’ and ‘(im)pureness’. Those beginning with ch- came into English via French, and caste via Portuguese.

Finally, there are other unrelated words containing cast, including castanets and castor oil.

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