When a political issue or policy becomes dominant and pervasive, we often develop a shorthand term for it. In the past, for instance, when people spoke of "abolition" and "prohibition," everyone knew they were referring to slavery and alcohol, respectively. And today we all know that "open carry" and "pro-choice" apply, in turn, to hand guns and abortion.

The pattern is clear: The full phrase becomes so well known that we adopt its abbreviated form with no risk of being misunderstood. The adjective "fraught," though not a political term, has undergone a similar process of acquiring a specific, assumed meaning.

"Fraught" derives from the Middle Dutch "vracht," meaning "load," the root that also gives us "freight." Its first recorded use in English came in a 14th-century poem describing a large ship so laden with cargo ("so hevy fraught") that it could barely sail.

Soon people extended the physical meaning of fraught to the imposition of emotional burdens as well, as William Shakespeare did in "The Winter's Tale": "I am so fraught with curious business that I leave out ceremony."

For the next few centuries, people always used "fraught" followed by a prepositional phrase to indicate exactly what was "fraughting" them, e.g., "fraught with peril," "fraught with errors." Sometimes "fraught" even appeared in a more positive sense, e.g., "fraught with humor," "fraught with irony."

Then came the 1960s, a decade that was surely fraught with anxiety, and that's when Americans started using the stand-alone "fraught" to mean "tense, stressful." The Brits had been using the "with"-less "fraught" for decades, and their cultural, musical and linguistic invasion of the U.S. during the 1960s helped spur the trend. The similarity of "fraught" to "fright" undoubtedly played a role as well.

The earliest citations of the stand-alone "fraught" include: "The next day was going to be particularly fraught" (1967); "Don't look so fraught" (1970).

Thus, in the same way that "abolition" and "prohibition" once narrowed in meaning to refer to slavery and alcohol, "fraught" came to mean "causing or having intense emotional stress or worry." A recent New York Times headline, for instance, cited Canada's "suddenly fraught relationship with the United States."

Is this use of the unmodified "fraught" now acceptable? You bet.

As Tigger wisely observes in "Pooh's Heffalump Movie," "You just can't argue with a word like 'fraught.'"

Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Connecticut, invites your language sightings. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via email to [email protected] or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254.

Photo credit: at Pixabay