Back in the 1400s the word “paradigm” entered English. It’s from the Greek word “paradeiknynal,” which means “to show side by side,” and in English it meant a pattern or example. It was never a particularly popular word, and by the 1600s it had been relegated to the realm of grammar; it was used to mean a set of examples showing inflection. For example, the Latin conjugation table (at least I think this is conjugation) “amo, amas, amat.”
Everything went along just fine for “paradigm” for centuries; it was a technical term you might encounter in school, but you’d seldom use it afterwards. Then Thomas Kuhn arrived and published the book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” in 1962. Kuhn used the word to mean a world view, and talked about “paradigm shifts” in science. For example, when the Earth-centric “paradigm” was replaced by the heliocentric “paradigm,” and Europeans started thinking about things differently.
One of the things they started thinking differently about was the word “paradigm;” the book was a surprise hit (even though it was one of those books, like “A Brief History of Time” that a great many more people bought than actually read; it’s not the easiest book). After that, “paradigms” and “paradigm shifts” became part of popular culture. Politicians started talking about “economic paradigms,” marketers referred to “paradigms” when they were thinking of new ways to sell sugared water, and the nice, boring existence “paradigm” had enjoyed for hundreds of years was blown to smithereens. “Paradigm” seems like it might be fading a bit from its recent overpopularity, but it’s probably too late to return to its previous meaning; nowadays it’s even in the dictionary as “a cognitive framework shared by members of any discipline or group.” Even when the group has no connection to “amo, amas, amat.”
As for the “smithereens” that paradigm’s original paradigm ended up in, it’s a fairly recent adoption (early 1800s) from the Gaelic word “smidirin.” The “-een” on the end is a diminutive, the same as in the name “Colleen.” The first part comes from “smiodar,” which means “fragment.” “Smithereens,” then, are little bits of something that used to be whole. There’s some evidence that there used to be a NON-diminutive version “smithers,” which meant whatever got shattered ended up in big pieces instead of small ones. But humanity’s ability to blow stuff to bits has come a long way since 1800, so along the way it probably became quite passé to even talk about blowing anything into any pieces that weren’t tiny.
