Either Way; Thank you, Lady Marina, for leading us to that truth.

Spiffy! Or should I say spooky!

Gracias Evan!

My amateur, ground level understanding of word change is that new words, and new definitions for old words, perculate up from below. Bad becomes Good because everybody’s grooving to Michael Jackson. [Gauntlet/gantlet] was/were never used that often, save by newspapers, magazines, etc., and other professional entities who must have had a dictionary lying around somewhere.

Now – the word stuff I’m really interested in -

A- GANTLET, GAUNTLET. Here’s an entry from dictionary.com: Word History: The spelling gauntlet is acceptable for both gauntlet meaning “glove” or “challenge” and gauntlet meaning “a form of punishment in which lines of men beat a person forced to run between them”; but this has not always been the case. The story of the gauntlet used in to throw down the gauntlet is linguistically unexciting: it comes from the Old French word gantelet, a diminutive of gant, “glove.” From the time of its appearance in Middle English (in a work composed in 1449), the word has been spelled with an au as well as an a, still a possible spelling. But the gauntlet used in to run the gauntlet is an alteration of the earlier English form gantlope, which came from the Swedish word gatlopp, a compound of gata, “lane,” and lopp, “course.” The earliest recorded form of the English word, found in 1646, is gantelope, showing that alteration of the Swedish word had already occurred. The English word was then influenced by the spelling of the word gauntlet, “glove,” and in 1676 we find the first recorded instance of the spelling gauntlet for this word, although gantelope is found as late as 1836. From then on spellings with au and a are both found, but the au seems to have won out.
I can understand and accept the concept of word change bubbling up from a pop cult niche to effect a system wide change – Michael Jackson has a megasmash album and suddenly ‘Bad’ is ‘Good.’ GANTLET/GAUNTLET, though, have always lived in a small pond frequented mostly by editors and headline writers. How is it a word that shares nothing but phonetics with another word supplants that word?

B- POLICE/COP. Until recently (last 20 years) you’d never, outside the tabloids, see the word ‘cop’ used to refer to a law officer, except when bracketed between thug-generated quotation marks. You see it in newspapers often nowadays, at least this side of the NYT and in the… what… seven remaining daily newspapers left in the US. ‘Cop’ never made Carlin’s list, and was never a taboo word, but there was always something a bit unsavory about it. Why did this change?