"Professor Hogben... is unwilling to look 'egregious' up in the dictionary and see what it means."
People keep using the word "egregious", which
does not mean what they often think it means. According to the
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary:
- e·gre·gious ( \i-ˈgrē-jəs\ IPA: /ɪˈɡriː.dʒəs/ or /əˈɡriː.dʒi.əs/)Pro.
eh-gree-jous or -ji-ous (as in "agree" plus "just" minus "t")
adj. 1 archaic : distinguished 2 : conspicuous; especially : conspicuously bad : flagrant <egregious errors>. Latin egregius, from e- + greg-, grex herd
- e·gre·gious·ly adverb
- e·gre·gious·ness noun
You'll see this word used often
on This Very Wiki.
Repeatedly used, you could even say (and
egregiously at that). It's almost as if people are looking for reasons to put it in, as if it were the trigger for some kind of pleasurable behavior. The word itself has become a somewhat
Discredited Meme, as more instances of its use are linked to this page than not.
Now drink up!
Of course, the real reason is that people want to look
learnèd on this site.
note Alternatively, it's just a really fun word to say. Go ahead, try it! So, instead of saying "This series is a particularly bad example in that...", you get "This series is particularly egregious in..." Alternatively, it's a way of using an
Unusual Euphemism — since calling a show "badly written" might spark an
Edit War, they use a word that is, strictly speaking, neutral, but has inescapable negative connotations.
A much less used word that seems to be the target of much egregious grasping is "gregarious", which means "social" or "sociable". If someone's talking about an "egregious person", this is what they were going for (unless they just don't like the guy). Oh, and "egregarious" is not the Internet equivalent of being sociable, it's not a word at all,
despite what some people seem to think
.
Waldorf: People sure seem to like the word "egregious".
Statler: That's because it describes them!
Both: Do-ho-ho-ho-hoh!
