Egregious and Genial

About 13 years ago I received a book present from Peter Macdonald, long-time editor of the Hutchinson (KS) News. Such a present was not unusual coming from Peter. He was constantly telling stories, enlivening conversations, pressing me and himself to improve our daily speech and writing. The book? The Superior Person's Book of Words, by Peter Bowler (first Am. ed. 1985). So successful was this book that Bowler, like the makers of the movie Rocky, decided to have at least two sequels. In any case, while cleaning out my office recently, I came across this book and decided to spend some time with it. While you wonder why some of the words are even in the book (such as the familiar words pragmatism or qualm or sexist or recidivism), many of them are actually useful. A few even have interesting histories which will help you never to forget the word. This essay tells you about a few of them.

Egregious

My quick Google-searches for this word show that it most frequently occurs with two nouns in English, "blunder" and "mistake." To make an "egregious blunder" means that you make a blunder that is "remarkable in a bad sense; gross, flagrant, outrageous." Indeed, Shakespeare is one of the first to use egregious in this way. From Cymbeline, "Italian Fiend...Egregious murderer..." By the 17th century one could have "egregious liars and imposters" or an "egregious ass." The rest, so they say, is history. We use the term now as one of disparagement. It is a great term for "university-types." I recall a former colleague of mine whose favorite words were fatuous, egregious and unalterably. People's explanations were often fatuous (i.e., foolish); their behavior was egregious (i.e. bad or unconscionable--another great "university" word) and she, by the way, was unalterably opposed to the death penalty.

But when you give egregious a chance to explain itself you have a much more interesting history. Taking the word apart, you have the Latin prefix ex means "out of" or "from," and grex, gregis (i.e., nominative and genitive cases), which means "herd" or "flock." Thus, someone that is egregious is someone who stands out of the flock or is unique in some way. It is like the phrase on the back of our coins/bills, e pluribus unum ("one out of many"). When we realize this derivation, it is no surprise to discover that the original and heavily favored meaning of egregious through the 18th century was remarkable in a good sense. The OED says. "Of persons and personal qualities: distinguished, eminent, excellent, renowned." Examples go back to 1534: "Peda, the sonne of Penda, an aegregius yonge gentilmanne." The Douay version of the Bible (1609) could describe one of the builders of the Israelite tabernacle in the wilderness in the following way: "Ooliab..was himself aslo an egregious artificer in wood" (Ex. 38:23). Thomas Hobbes who, along with John Locke, helped articulate some modern theories of the nation-state, could say in the mid-17th century, "I am not so egregious a mathematician as you are" (he meant it in a good sense!).

Well, what is stopping us from restoring eqregious to its prized position? With all our overuse of the word "excellence" in the last 25 years (I think the modern push to use the word came in the wake of the 1983 report criticizing public schools in America--A Nation at Risk. As a means of rebutting the critiques in the report, superintendents began tripping all over themselves saying they believed in "excellence." It really was the word of the late 1980s), one would think that someone would have pointed out that egregious, in its positive sense, would be good to resurrect. That is what I am doing here. Let's begin to celebrate egregious behavior or egregious books or ideas. It will confuse people for a while, but they will catch on...

Genial

We all know the word genial in the sense of "sympathetically cheerful, jovial, kindly." But if you look at the OED, you realize that this definition is the fifth one for the term. It wasn't first used in this way until the mid-18th century, even though the term has an English-language origin in the 16th. If we look deeply at the word and its origin, however, we see it related to such words as genius, genital, and generate. Let's just get the basics here. The basic Latin word is genius, which is has its origin in classical pagan (i.e., non-Christian) belief. One's genius was a "tutelary god or attendant spirit allotted to every person at his birth, to govern his fortunes, determine his character and, finally, to conduct him out of the world." Thus, just as today some may speak about their "angels" guiding them, so in antiquity people spoke of their "genius." It wasn't until the 17th century that genius was used in the popular manner today--a special endowment making a person more gifted than others.

But we also see in the word genial a reference to generation or production of offspring. The first meaning of genial, going back to 1566, was "pertaining to marriage, nuptial; also, pertaining to generation, generative." The genial bed was a translation of the Latin lectus genialis. But the word evolved in the next two centuries somewhat as follows. Something genial is something generative and therefore something conducive to growth. A genial climate would be pleasantly mild. "Ye genial Springs! Pierian Waters, hail!" Something warm and pleasant in nature could easily then be ascribed to a person who was warm, inviting, accommodating--all the things we today associate with the term genial.

Conclusion--A Bonus Word--Garb

Bowler pointed out in his book something I didn't know--that the word "garb," which we know means one's "dress" or "clothes," originated from the Italian "garbo" meaning "grace, elegance." Thus, it first meant one's stylishness of manners or appearance. Though it took genial and egregious a century or two to go from the original to present meaning, garb quickly became associated with any dress or costume a person might wear. Sort of a "dumbing down" of the word, from elegant to whatever you are wearing. Such is the history of language.

The next essay explores a few obscure words, mostly from the end of the alphabet.

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