Als Witze Scherze waren. Über den semantischen Wortwandel in der Standardsprache und in der philosophischen Sprache am Beispiel des Worts Witz und dessen Gebrauch im Werk Gedancken von Schertzen von Georg Friedrich Meier (1744)

Polysemy, the expression capacity for a word to refer to diverse objects depending on its usage, for instance, the German word Witz, is usually registered in lexicons by listing its several meanings. The registration of different meanings for the same word does not explain word polysemy, a phenomenon which characterizes the majority of contemporary German words. Word polysemy can be interpreted by means of word change, as will be shown here by the example of the word Witz. In contemporary German, Witz belongs to two opposing, mutually contradictory and mutually exclusive semantic fields; the first one relating to the intellectual capacity of human beings; and the other one to the sphere of comicality. This kind of “oxymoronic polysemy" is due to the semantic development of the word Witz, which was at least partly determined by the contact and mutual influence of Witz as a common word in everyday language and also Witz as a specific term in the language of philosophy. The aesthetics of the eighteenth century refers by means of the word Scherz to that form of comedy which in contemporary standard German is known as Witz. This is paradigmatically documented in Georg Friedrich Meier's essay Gedancken von Schertzen (1744).