07.30.08

A fulsome dialogue—however you want to define the word

Posted in language change, persnickitors, word history, word misuse at 6:58 am by Bill Brohaugh

Allow me to give fulsome praise to a certain word history.

Hold on there, Mr. “Everything You Know About English You Get Bitchy About,” sir!

Aha, a persnickitor in our midst. Let me guess. You screech at me because I’ve misused fulsome in a positive sense, yes?

Indeed! Your usage is egregious! Fulsome means, well, let me turn it over to William Safire in his June sixth column:

Fulsome does not mean “full.” Nor does it mean “complete, well developed” or other pleasing synonyms of abundance. On the contrary, the adjective is used not in a compliment, but in an insult, meaning “excessive.” Its frequent use in “fulsome praise” gives that phrase the meaning of “cloying, unctuous, obsequious flattery.”

Though loosey-goosey usagists may accept the turning of the word’s meaning on its head, most of us draw the line at such surrender to error.

That might depend on who “us” is, I suppose. Woe Is I authors Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman wrote last year that “the word ‘fulsome’ has been misused so much lately that it may be beyond saving.” One might make a case that “misused so much” (a negative perspective) might be synonymous with “becoming common use” (a neutral or potentially positive perspective), a perspective shift as egregious as allowing fulsome to soften from negative to neutral, I suppose.

Now, I wonder if any language observers in the 1300s and later years were worried about fulsome being “misused so much” when the word first started changing meaning . . . from its original sense of, simply, “full, abundant, plentiful”—the very meaning that persnickitors decry today. That meaning was recorded around the middle of the 1200s (which, I acknowledge, O’Conner and Kellerman themselves note). The word later (oh, those loosey-goosey usagists, turning the word’s meaning on its head!) took meanings of “too full,” and eventually “obnoxiously full.”

So the word history I originally sought to offer my fulsome praise was the history of fulsome itself, of course. And I agree: my use of a shifting word meaning was indeed egregious, in that the first recorded use of egregious, the Oxford English Dictionary tells me, was in the sense of “remarkably good.”

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