I thought I had a basic understanding of the word so while I was listening to NPR this afternoon it’s not like I was sent shrieking to the dictionary. I forget what show it was but it was an interview with a three-strikes-and-your-out felon turning his life around (a good thing, mind you), getting his sentence reduced from life w/o parole and upon release, becoming a paralegal.
His crimes were basically robberies from what I gathered, the last one where he duct taped his female victim so he had time to make a getaway. Anyway, in the course of his interview, he said that he didn’t think that his crimes were particularly egregious. I thought that they seemed exactly so. Maybe not on the par of the Green River Killer but still…
So that sent me to the dictionary for the precise definition. This was what I found:
[INDENT]adjective: egregious
1. outstandingly bad; shocking.
2. (archaic) remarkably good.
[/INDENT]WTF? Used to mean remarkably good but today means outstandingly bad?
I would say that the word really just means “remarkable”, but carries a connotation of “bad” and is generally paired with negative words, like “egregious error”, “egregious crime”, etc. It’s not too unbelievable that the primary meaning would be static but the connotation might change over time due to irony, etc.
Google says it comes from Latin meaning “standing out from the flock”, which seems fairly neutral.
So do you read a lot of very old books or are you some sort of immortal? Because according to my Shorter Oxford, the use of egregious to mean prominent in a good sense was archaic by 1738
I always understood “egregious” in its literal sense; whether the thing in question is good or bad is clear from the context. Am less than 300 years old.
People hear somebody use a word and think “Wow, what an impressive sounding word. I’m going to start throwing that into my conversations.” The problem is these people often have only a vague understanding of what the word means and use it incorrectly. Eventually the various incorrect meanings becomes as widespread as the real meaning and the word no longer has a real meaning.
No it just has a different meaning, not “no real meaning”.
The process you describe (or processes like it) were what resulted in words having what you think of as “correct” or “real” meanings; the latter meanings being “wrong” to a person 50 or 100 or 200 years ago.
I’m not convinced that there has been any meaning shift for “literally”. There are however a hellava lot of people who are using it hyperbolically at the moment, and a hellava lot more people who don’t know the difference between incorrect and hyperbolic usage.
Whether this trend will result in a meaning shift for 'literally" it is too early to tell I think.
I had to look it up about thirty years ago when I saw it in a very old newspaper column that I was using as the basis for an essay. The exact phrase used was “egregious destitution”.
The meaning then, and as I understand it still, was ‘noteworthy, but in a negative way’, akin to infamous.
