Evolving meanings

[019] ... [Reading]

I remember to bookmark or copy to notes what sounds interesting to me when reading an e-book or elsewhere, and many times it comes in handy or leads to learning something, like in the one below from an old book.

... showed me to a room upstairs, where I placed my bag. The furniture of the place was of the sort one expects to find in an ordinary lodging house—horsehair sofas, loo tables, lustres, and so forth.

Since these days loo connotes something different, I wondered if it was a typo for low tables and out of sheer curiosity when loo-king up, it seemed very correct as the word carried a different meaning in the past.

1: An old card game in which the winner of each trick or a majority of tricks takes a portion of the pool while losing players are obligated to contribute to the next pool. 2 : money staked at loo.

The above quote incidentally is from Detective stories, by Arthur Morrison whom I discovered recently, published in the early 1900s. I prefer to add a few words on the author in a future post.

There are so many more such words that have come to mean differently from the originally intended, slangily or otherwise. Mobile to many has to be a cellphone, unaware of the term as an adjective since ages. The list is quite a few, and the one that comes to mind (sort of related to this post) is WC, which needs to be posted separately, specially since I need to first locate an old publication that carried a joke on its mix-up of usage.