Its initial borrowing likely came as a result of the Norman Conquest of 1066, which placed French and English speakers linguistically in close contact, and subsequently large amounts of words were borrowed from Old French. Due to the French ‘high society’ emerging as a result of the conquest, the Anglo-French diglossia (Bergs, Ungeheuer and Wiegand, 2012) was unconcealed and French was seen as the superior language used in the arts, science, education, and generally the ‘highbrow’ of society. However, around the mid-14th Century, when fatal was first recorded in Chaucer’s Troilus & Criseyde, the blatant use of French in this manner had diminished and these French/Latin borrowed words were incorporated into what was assumed to be the ‘proper’ and ‘formal’ manner of speaking English, a form of ‘latent digolossia’ (Chubarov, 2015). Furthermore, it is important to note that fatal became to fit in with traditional English morphology of merging a noun, fate, with the suffix –al, which forms an adjective from the root word. The reasoning behind its slow semantic change may be tied to fatal’s lack of usage in informal language. The precise area of original usage suggests that social prestige was perhaps the leading reason for the stationary nature of the word’s meaning. While being borrowed from Old French in its original form “fatale”, the word fatal originates from the Latin fātālis (OED, 2015), indicating its romantic inheritance. It is most commonly used in intellectual, academic and formal contexts rather than colloquially. The diminutive group of people using fatal possibly meant less influence on how the word was used, leading to this slow evolution of meaning. A. Barclay is first recorded using fatal in its most common Modern Day English usage, meaning “producing or resulting in death, destruction, or irreversible ruin, material or immaterial; deadly, destructive, ruinous.” (OED, 2015), in his work Fyfte Eglog, 1518, in which he talked about a “fatal fruyte (fruit)”. This seems to allude to the “fruit” of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”, as mentioned in Genesis 2:17 (MacArthur, 2006), which suggests that the strengthened use of fatal in its modern day definition may have started within the Christian Church, tying in with its beliefs of the ultimate fate of humans being a death decreed by God from the fall of man in the Garden of Eden and from the beginning of time. …show more content…
Clearly linked to the current meaning of “ruinous” or “deadly”, it is used in noun phrases such as “fatal errors” or “fatal exceptions” to denote a “sudden end to the running of a [computer] program” (Dictionary.com, 2015), as if the program was dying. This more figurative use of the word is a one that is used in the jargon of a very specific set of people, mainly those who are skilled and learned in computer software, and is recorded as early as circa 1997. Therefore, this usage does not signify further semantic change, but rather a modern day application of fatal’s current