Shrewdly, These Words Have Improved Their Meanings

Rob Kyff
Tue, 06 Jan 2026 23:00:00 -0800
Lifestyle

Five hundred years ago, if I had called one of my students "a shrewd lad with dogged ambition," he might have left the classroom in tears.

Back in 1526, "shrewd" meant hurtful, a "lad" was a lowly servant, "dogged" meant malicious, and "ambition" denoted "excessive striving for wealth or power." Since then, these words have undergone "melioration," a fancy linguistic term for a word's acquisition of a more positive meaning.

"Shrewd," which derives from the same root as "shrew," once meant "abusive, dangerous." It was even applied to inanimate objects, as when William Shakespeare wrote, in "Richard II," of "shrewd steel against our golden crown" and, in "Love's Labor's Lost," of "shrewd unhappy gallows."
Updated: Wed Jan 07, 2026

Five hundred years ago, if I had called one of my students "a shrewd lad with dogged ambition," he might have left the classroom in tears.

Back in 1526, "shrewd" meant hurtful, a "lad" was a lowly servant, "dogged" meant malicious, and "ambition" denoted "excessive striving for wealth or power." Since then, these words have undergone "melioration," a fancy linguistic term for a word's acquisition of a more positive meaning.

"Shrewd," which derives from the same root as "shrew," once meant "abusive, dangerous." It was even applied to inanimate objects, as when William Shakespeare wrote, in "Richard II," of "shrewd steel against our golden crown" and, in "Love's Labor's Lost," of "shrewd unhappy gallows."

(Riddle: How do you cheer up an unhappy gallows? With gallows humor, of course.)

By 1700, however, English had tamed this "shrewd," giving us the "cunning, astute" meaning we use today.

"Lad" first referred to a servant, with the implication of a lowly birth. It was frequently contrasted with its alliterative antonym "lord," as in the Scottish proverb, "Lay up like a laird (lord), and seek like a lad." Or, as my Scots-Irish high-school basketball coach would say when I took an errant jump shot, "Lord! Seek a lay-up, lad!"

It wasn't until the 1500s that "lad" came to mean "boy."

As for "dogged," this word originally meant having the worst qualities of a canine — being vicious, snarly, always begging people to throw you sticks. Back then, for instance, an evil person was said to have "a dogged heart" (though one wonders whether dogged hearts harbored heartworms.)

During the 1700s, the meaning of "dogged" narrowed and improved to indicate a positive trait of dogs — persistence (think stick-throwing).

"Ambition" is derived from the Latin "ambitio," literally "to go round." The Romans gave "ambitio" a specific political meaning — "to go around among people seeking their votes" (think schmoozing, glad-handing politician).

This connotation of excessive, even obsessive, striving for success carried over into the word "ambition" when it first appeared in English.

This is the meaning Shakespeare's Brutus had in mind when he denounced Caesar's "ambition." In repudiating Brutus' accusation, Marc Antony's famous funeral oration dramatized the taint that the word "ambition" carried in Shakespeare's day. If Caesar were ambitious, Antony says, "it was a grievous fault."

Since then, "ambition" has ambitiously climbed the linguistic ladder from fault to forte.