Someone might say ‘I make a mean pot of chilli!’ I believe that originally, statements like that were self-depreciating ways of saying you to something well. That is, a person might be saying that he makes a pot of chilli that’s not especially good nor especially bad. He’s saying it’s ‘just average’. In fact, he’s saying that he makes an exceptionally good pot of chilli; but he’s being humble.
Nowadays I get the impression that when someone uses ‘mean’ to describe something he does well, he uses it in the sense of ‘vicious’; and ‘vicious’ means that it’s so good it’s like an assault on the senses. ‘Slap yo momma good’, as it were. (If I may digress without hijacking the OP in my own thread, I understand that last means something akin to ‘This food is so good, I want to punish my mother for not feeding me anything this good when I was growing up.’)
So here’s the question: If people who say ‘I make a mean [X]’ are actually using ‘mean’ in the sense of unkind and not in the sense of average, when did this shift of the meaning take place?
