Ever since I was a kid I always found it odd when the reporter describing the Hindenburg disaster said, “Its a terrific crash…” because the word terrific has always meant great, wonderful.
It was only as I got older that I realized that terrific is to terror as horrific is to horror, so it actually should mean something bad. Terrible, actually. But it doesn’t. At all. It has a really strong, intrinsically positive connotation. How did this happen? I found one online dictionary which gave a date of 1888 as the first positive reference, but nothing else. Is this something that even can be traced?
The OED shows the first use of the “terrible, frightful” sense in Milton’s *Paradise Lost(1667), but the modern sense of superlatively good not until 1930.
Since the T’s haven’t been updated since the 1980s, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it back just a little farther.
I suspect some of these usage switches occurred in religious contexts, where the boundaries between fear/admiration, particularly with respect to God, are sometimes blended. For example the phrase “the great and terrible day of the Lord” - which I believe is intended to refer to terror, but is also bad news, so ‘terrible’ becomes ‘bad’ rather than specifically ‘that which invokes terror’.
Originally, terrific is from two Latin roots meaning “terror-making” - that is frightening or causing terror. So, you would speak of a terrific noise, when you described a noise that greatly frightened you. With time, the meaning widened to mean surprisingly big, and then narrowed again to mean big and good.
It’s a strange jump in meaning, but it’s now established firmly as a word with positive implications.
Curiously, horrific was a very similar word. Its roots in Latin mean “horror-making”. However, horrific explosions are definitely bad things, and the sense has not moved over to the positive side.
Terrible is from the Latin word terribilis, frightening. Originally, it meant frightening in English, too. It has also softened in meaning and now means very bad or awful in modern English.
Oddly, the word awful has gone the other way. It used to have a positive meaning, “causing awe”. One might speak of the awful Niagara Falls, because you felt awe when you saw them. Today, it has followed the word terrible, and means “very bad”.
If you read older English texts, watch for these words or you may misunderstand the way they are used. Writers in the past knew Latin and ancient Greek, and would be conscious of the underlying meaning of any word rooted in those languages.
“Extra” is a Latin prefix meaning outside or beyond. So, extraordinary means beyond the ordinary. Extraterrestrial means outside Earth (which is terra in Latin). “Something extra” means something beyond what you already have.
But be careful, because some words beginning “extra-” are not related to this. So, “extract” is from “ex” meaning out and “trahere” meaning draw - to draw out.
With “terrific” it can actually be surprisingly hard to make the distinction in meaning.
To illustrate what I mean, I just ran a search for “terrific” in the archive of The Times from 1926 to 1934, as that is around the time that the shift in meaning is recorded in the OED (according to samclem.
The very first result in that period is from January 11, 1926, in a football report of an FA Cup match:
That wouldn’t look out of place in a report today. A terrific shot is a great one, but the “frightening” meaning also makes sense in this context.
In fact, a lot of the examples I’m finding are from sport reports. Here, a week later on January 18, 1926, in a report on squash rackets:
Here, I think, the meaning is fairly unambiguously “great”, perhaps with an element of terrifying battle…
The word terrific is used in it’s “terror-making” sense as late as 1938 in the radio drama The War of the Worlds, but it may be a carry-over from H.G. Welles’ original.
Didn’t the Terrytoon Tom Terrific appear in the late 1950s? I would say the positive meaning was well entrenched by then. However, I never hear it in real life as anything except the sarcastic context.
For some reason I can’t help but think that advertising, first print then broadcast, had something to do with it. The time frame fits.
When it meant big & terrible terrific had a sort of ominous, serious tone to it. Not the kind of word that got everyday use. But now terrific seems to be a rather overly colorful, almost cavalier adjective, i.e. the kind that serious authors, speakers etc. tend to avoid because advertisers (and young people) use it so much!
I’d still use it like that. I’d also say ‘I have a/an stupendous/amazing/outstanding headache.’ None of those is meant to convey the idea that my headache is a positive thing, just that it’s beyond the norm.
There a hell of a lot of words that mean ‘really really good’ and also mean ‘really really big’ or ‘shocking.’
