Most of us procrastinate—after all, no one really jumps at the chance to write a term paper or is in a rush to make that appointment for an overdue colonoscopy—but, besides the guilt we feel when we push something off we know we need to do, have you ever wondered how our tendency to drag our feet has impacted our language?

It turns out that our human propensity for procrastinating—as well as exaggerating how quickly we think we will do something—is nothing new and looking back at changes in word meanings earlier in our history can show us just how this part of being human has reshaped words we use every day.

Too soon?

First, take the word soon. When someone tells you they will be there “soon,” what does that mean to you?

Well, for most of us, it means they will arrive within a reasonably short time, but not right this minute. In fact, if you showed up on my doorstep immediately, I might even be a bit annoyed since I had anticipated having a little time to clean up my messy kitchen.

But if we go back in time to the word’s inception, in Old English, “sóna” meant something a bit different from how we use it today. In these early days of English, around the 7^th through 10^th centuries, the word meant “immediately” rather than how we use it to mean “in a short while” today.

Since Old English is quite different (and unintelligible) compared to modern English, it is hard to give a direct example, but essentially “He went soon into battle,” would have meant, “He went at once into battle,” rather than "shortly" as we would have understood it in modern English.

There was also no equivalent to modern comparatives such as “sooner,” since the whole point is that you are doing something right away. There isn’t a way to do it more right away than you intended.

So, what happened?

Likely, our human tendency to be a little slow to motivate, coupled with our tendency to exaggerate how quickly something would happen, started to influence when and how this word was used.

Soon but not immediately

Source: Ross Mann/Pixabay

For example, even early on, people seemed to have used the word “soon” even if it was a bit of an exaggeration of how immediately something would happen, as in a child telling his parents, “I am soon (at once) to bed,” while still playing marbles. Thus, such expressive tendencies stretched the meaning of the word to a sense of “sort of but not quite immediately.”

By the early Middle English period (around the 12^th century), soon—often written at the time as sonne—started to be mainly used to mean “shortly” and, as a result, developed a comparative sense (i.e., sooner) by the 13^th century.

While in modern English, soon is only used in its sense of “shortly” anymore, we do see echoes of its original meaning when it is used in the “as soon as” construction. So, for instance, if one says, “I will leave as soon as you get home,” it still conveys the meaning of immediacy or at once, per its original sense.

I come anon

As it turns out, our tendency toward slowness and exaggeration has not just shifted the meaning of the adverb soon over time, but several other temporal adverbs as well.

For instance, in Romeo and Juliet, Juliet, in trying to put off her nursemaid for a bit longer, tells her she will come “anon.” While we don’t anon each other very much anymore, in Shakespeare’s day, it carried the meaning of “shortly” or “a short while.”

But, like soon, the earlier meaning of anon was “at once” or “immediately,” as in “he wente him anone,” meaning “he went at once.” But, around the 15^th century, this meaning became archaic, and it took on the meaning, as for Shakespeare, of “in just a bit” or “in a little while.”

In the present day

More recently, we see this same type of creep in the meaning of still another time-oriented adverb—namely, the adverb presently.

Though in modern use, both soon and anon have completely lost their earlier sense of “at once,” we still see a touch of this meaning lingering in the “(at) present” part of presently.

Not surprisingly, the word’s earliest meaning (around the 14^th century) was “immediately” and, in rare use, presently is still used with this more “at this moment” sense, as in “I am presently heading to the store.” But today when someone says they will do something presently, they typically mean “in just a bit,” and this less immediate meaning has been the most prominent one since the 17^th century.

The shift in usage from the older sense to the current one was subtle, as it could often be ambiguous as to which sense one intended (as in the example just given), and it is this potential for listener misinterpretation that probably ushered in the move from this earliest meaning to the modern one.

Only time will tell

So, will our tendency for procrastination and exaggeration continue to ravage our temporal adverbs as it has in our past? Unless human nature changes drastically over the next decades, very likely. In fact, just ask the adverb directly how it is faring these days.