Has the word "humor" shifted meaning?
The original meaning of humor of course refers to the obsolete theory of the four humors and their effect on human temperament. I'm not asking about that.
It appears that initially, the meaning shifted from any behavior, to a specific type of behavior that we may call (or have called in recent history) "convivial", "congenial" or "agreeable". It is not uncommon to assume that a hallmark of a person who is agreeable would be a readiness to engage in jokes and playfulness, and most like to be around such people, so it is not hard to see how it came to be said that such people have "good humor" (pleasant character).
Nowadays we use sense of humor to mean the ability to share and appreciate funny things. It's possible in modern parlance for a person to have an excellent sense of humor and yet be an abstruse, unlikable curmudgeon. Indeed, many successful comedians are reportedly very unpleasant in private, do not have "good humor", and are bad at getting along and hard to get along with. We even have a concept of a person who tells bad jokes (annoying, offensive, unfunny) and consequently is unpleasant to be around.
Is this a true shift in meaning, in that the concept of a taste or liking for funny things is legitimately divorced from being a good sport? Or is it in fact the same word (always meaning "good character") but the shift (towards dramatically more elitism and quid-pro-quo/transactionalism) has been in what society considers good character?
2 answers
Definitions
Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the usage of the word humor has expanded to several distinct meanings that are all still in active use.
- Humor as mood, as shown in good humor. Bad humor is also still in use, as demonstrated in the question, suggesting that this usage isn’t strictly required to be positive.
- Humor as an observable quality, as shown in a sense of humor, the quality of being amusing.
- Humor as an activity, the act or practice of being, or attempting to be, humorous. Note, this is a skillful activity that someone can be bad at.
- Humor as something done by an agreeable person, as shown in humoring someone.
The dictionaries I’ve checked so far suggest that the word entered English via Old French (humour), following an expansion in meaning like so:
fluid -> mood -> whim -> funny
The connection likely being made due to the fact that the same bodily fluids believed to control health, at the time, were also believed to control a person’s state of mind, which in turn influenced wit, mood, and disposition.
Ambiguity & Misc.
Based on continuing and varied usage of the word over the past five centuries, we don’t have strong reason to believe that a good sense of humor wasn’t used to describe curmudgeons with a strong wit previously! The only requirement for this particular usage of the word is that someone finds it amusing, which is highly subjective.
I’d wager that some of the confusions presented in the question actually reflect some degree of ambiguity in determining the definition of humor being used. For instance, saying someone disagreeable is bad humored is less ambiguous because it can’t be interpreted as saying they have a bad sense of humor, vs. saying they have bad humor.
Similarly, someone who continually tells bad or offensive jokes may be said to be bad at humor or attempting unsuccessfully to be humorous, which makes it clearer that they may not necessarily be in bad humor (mood) while doing so, but that the people they are with do not find it amusing or that they are performing the activity of humor unskillfully.
That said, there were obviously many changes to how people related to each other in the twentieth century, but this answer is already fairly long and this topic could fill several books!
No, the word "humor" haven't shifted meaning.
There has always been bad humor, good humor, off-color humor, inappropriate humor, gallows humor, military humor, physician humor, programmers' humor, dark humor, Russian humor, Jewish humor, British humor, беззлобный юмор (benign humor), острый юмор (spicy humor), юмор за чужой счет (humor at somebody's expense). It's still humor whether everybody likes it, or not everybody likes it. It's still humor even if not everybody gets it, or lack the background to get it. It's still humor even if one gets disciplined for it.
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