We didn't do our dive into the OED last time, so let's do it now: Words to explore: serendipitous, pell-mell, skirt, shirk, soldier (my addition, based on an interesting article in the BBC history site).
Here's an interesting list of sentences—the question mark is a conventional marking for a syntactically or (as here) semantically questionable usage.
Embrace the good and shun the bad.
?Embrace the right and shun the wrong.
good and bad|right and wrong
?good and wrong|?right and bad
good and evil|right and wrong
?good and wrong|?right and evil
If a math student says three plus two is five, what would an American or British teacher say? What if the student said four? How about a French or Italian teacher?
bien or bene or non or no
The difference these examples raise—at least for me—is at the center of "The Story of Right and Wrong," the third chapter of Anna Wierzbicka's book about the "cultural universe" of the Anglo-English spoken in Britain, Ireland, North America, Australia, New Zealand.
With right we are dealing with several words that relate to each other in the kind of polysemous web we talked about with see and hear.
A noun with four senses:
1) What is proper, correct, or consonant with justice;
2) A legal, moral, or natural entitlement
3) That which is straight.
4) A position or direction. (Opposed to left.)
An adjective with four senses:
1) Relating to position or direction, straight, not bent, curved, or crooked
2) Relating to truth, correctness, or propriety.
3) Relating to legitimacy or authenticity.
4) Relating to direction and orientation (that side of the human body which contains the hand which is naturally favoured in use over the other (left) hand by the majority of humans, or which is to the east when a person is facing north).
An adverb with several senses like those for the adjective, plus these:
1) Immediately, straightaway, at once
2) Emphasis: exactly, precisely, very.
A verb with senses that effectuate the nominal and adjectival meanings
A series of intejections that address the following conversational needs:
1) Expressing agreement, acquiescence, or consent: ‘yes, of course’, ‘OK’. Now freq. used ironically to express doubt
2) Appended as an interrogative to a clause, phrase, etc., inviting agreement, approval, or confirmation
3) Introducing an utterance, typically to indicate a change of topic or as a means of drawing attention to what the speaker is about to say
I've spent some time on the word because of its range of meanings. Its partner, wrong is less complicated. More or less, the meanings in the OED are "not right" with the interesting exception that the first meaning presented (the entries are organized by senses, within each of which the chronologically first appears at the top) is as follows:
I.1.a. c1175–1613
Having a crooked or curved course, form, or direction; twisted or bent in shape or contour; . . .
One of our current senses isn't much later:
II.3.a. a1275–
Of actions, etc.: deviating from equity, justice, or goodness; not morally right or equitable; unjust, perverse.
But the current usage that interests Wierzbicka—the opposite of right in a strictly binary choice—was presented clearly by Herbert Spencer:
Rightness expresses of actions, what straightness does of lines; and there can no more be two kinds of right action than there can be two kinds of straight line. (Social Statics 1892, chap. 32, sc. 4)
This opposition does not seem to Wierzbicka to exist in the vocabularies of other European languages and she thinks that reflects a strain in English culture (she likes Anglo because it includes Canada, the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand). Put very briefly, Anglo culture sees a need for certainties that can be referred to realms of knowledge based upon evidence and logic, while other cultures depend upon good and bad, conceptions that rest on unverifiable certainties. This preference is additive, not a replacement for discussions of good and bad actions. There's a lot more nuance to her argument that we inhabit a "culture-specific way of thinking: that deciding what to do—or what to say—can be a matter of following certain straightforward, public, rationally justifiable procedures; that ethics can be analogous to geometry."
Righter and rightest are usages that faded away through time, a process illustrated by the pattern of reduced use of true and increased use of right and wrong in the twentieth-century plays of G.B. Shaw as opposed to Shakespeare, and the similar differences between frequencies in spoken versus written twentieth-century British usage. Shaw used right over twice as many times as Shakespeare, and wrong almost ten times more often. Right was over six times more common in British speech than in British books.
Shipley's musings about reg(1) are interesting to me, "stretch out; reach for; move in a straight line; army formation; director of such movement; hence, leader." He links the root to rex, regiment, rajah, royal and so on. Rail, rank(and file), and rectitude are also in the word family. He diverges to explain the root of tabby cat, named for a Baghdad suburb where striped silk was made—part of what's fun about his book.
His account of uergh, to twist, leading to worry (originally strangle in Germanic) and wrong , is a little less involved:
uer II
Turn, spin, twist, wind, rub.
uerg
bend (English wrench, wrinkle)
uergh
twist (English worry (in the sense of strangle, as a wolf "worries" its prey), wrangle, wring, wrong.
The OED entry has some interesting features:
Etymology: Late Old English wrang , < Old Norse *wrangr, rangr awry, unjust (Norwegian vrang , rang , Middle Swedish vranger (Swedish vrång ), (Middle) Danish vrang ), = Middle Low German wrange , wrangh sour, bitter, Middle Dutch wrangh , wranc bitter, unpleasant, hostile (Dutch wrang acid, tart; whence West Frisian wrang ); related to wring v.
The adoption of the word in the Old English period is shown by its use as a n. (see wrong n.2), but examples of the adj. are lacking, unless on wrangan hylle in a Berkshire document of 944, preserved only in a 13th century copy (Birch Cartul. II. 557), is accepted as original, and as representing this word.
Meaning:
†1. a. Having a crooked or curved course, form, or direction; twisted or bent in shape or contour; wry.
?c1200
†b. Marked by deviation; deflected. Obs.
c1440
2. Of persons: Mis-shapen; deformed. Latterly dial.
c1430
II. 3. a. Of actions, etc.: Deviating from equity, justice, or goodness; not morally right or equitable; unjust, perverse
c 1340
The meaning that Wierzbicka argues is most prominent now appeared fairly early, including the binary quality she sees as crucial:
5. a. Not in conformity with some standard, rule, or principle; deviating from that which is correct or proper; contrary to, at variance with, what one approves or regards as right.
c1325