Last week, I talked about how my cousin Tom once asked me to say he was “awful,” and how that started me thinking about words whose meanings have evolved into the opposite of what they were originally. At the end of the column, I promised to give examples of some other words whose meanings have done a 180, so, without further adieu, here they are.
Let’s start with some bad words. You know, words like “artificial” and “egregious.” Both of these words, it turns out, used to mean nice things. Instead of referring to a copy of something natural, the original meaning of “artificial” was “artfully and skillfully constructed.”
“Egregious” comes from the Latin “ex grege,” which means “rising above the flock.” But by the 1600s, a century of intentional misuse had changed the word to mean something was very bad.
These days, if someone called you a “nervous nimrod” you’d probably be upset, but that wasn’t always the case. “Nervous” comes from the Latin word “nervosus,” meaning “sinewy” or “vigorous,” and didn’t come to mean “restless” or “agitated” until the middle of the 18th century.
Nimrod, of course, was a great hunter in the Book of Genesis. Bugs Bunny is largely credited with turning the name into an insult by way of sarcastically applying it to luckless wabbit hunter Elmer Fudd.
OK, enough with the insults. Instead, let’s look at things that are nice, smart and even terrific. “Nice” seems like a nice enough word, but this wasn’t always the case. Coming from the Latin word “nescius,” nice originally referred to an ignorant or foolish person before semantic drift took over and slowly changed the word’s definition, first to “finely dressed and shy” and finally to “refined and polite.’
In old English something “smart” was painful or stinging, a definition that is still in some use today, as in “That bee sting really smarts.” But eventually the word was also applied to anyone who possessed a “sharp tongue” and quick wit, before finally coming to refer to general intelligence.
While being “terrific” at something today is a great thing, that wasn’t always the case. This time the word’s original meaning is pretty obvious, since something that fills you with terror is “frightening.” By the mid-18th century, “terrific” had come to mean “great” or “severe,” before slipping into its modern meaning of “excellent.”
As unlikely as it sounds, “literally” is frequently used for emphasis in place of its antonym “figuratively.” For instance, anyone who says “I was literally blown away by the new James Bond movie” is literally lying because they wouldn’t be alive to make such a statement. And this misuse of the word is not a recent occurrence. Nope, according to Merriam-Webster, writers as far back as James Joyce and Charles Dickens have used “literally” (actually) to mean “figuratively” (virtually, metaphorically), so don’t blame me.
On a related note, I’ve long preached that “enormity” refers to the evil of a situation while “enormousness,” on the other hand, pertains to the size of something huge. Since the misuse of these two words is one of my pet peeves, I get slightly ticked off whenever I hear someone use them incorrectly.
At this point, you’re probably well ahead of me and already know that I’ve been proven wrong (I hate when that happens). You see, according to the folks at Merriam-Webster, “Yes, ‘enormity’ can mean ‘enormousness.”
They buttress their case by pointing out that “enormousness” originally meant “great evil,” but now means “great size,” so, they ask, “Why shouldn’t “enormity” follow the same path?” They go on to say that as more and more people use “enormity” to pertain to something’s size, the newer meaning is beginning to supplant the older meaning of “evilness.”
It now looks like it’s pointless to fight the slow inevitability of semantic drift and there’s nothing left to do but to use a timely metaphor and say, thanks for bursting my balloon, Merriam-Webster.
Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at jlwitherell19@gmail.com.
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