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You know, I don't see what is the "fun" in nitpicking words to put this article in Just for Fun. If anything it's just the opposite.
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It's an old injoke. People noticed that "egregious" was an uncommon word that was commonly used here more often than you would think, and things took off from there.
Edited by Specialist290
Is it a good idea to remove use of 'Egregious' in articles? If we're not careful then it means Permanent Red Link Club.
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Isn't it way too overboard to hunt down the use of a certain word? There may be times it fits. If not, reword it. But banning words just seems draconian for a wiki that calls itself "informal"
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New account is voidify
I just edited to show that it's used loads as a substitute/euphemism for 'notable' on This Very Wiki
Ha! Possibly nailed down the guy who started it all (outside TV Tropes, that is): Dr. Robert Hübner, German chess grandmaster, who named a book of his "Fünfundfünfzig feiste Fehler", which got translated to "egregious errors" for alliteration. (Justified, since he has a Ph.D. in papyrology and is very erudite.) "Possibly" since a search on Amazon also revealed English learning text with that phrase. Needs moar research.
When did this word come to indicate intelligence, arrogance and/or erudition?
It's a perfectly unassuming, serviceable word.
What the hell, tropers. Apparently viewers really are morons.
The Tape Fairy
The use of this word as a pothole is becoming pretty egregious.
It's a good thing our last name isn't Drew, because then you'd be Nancy Drew and I'd be Andrew Drew. -Andy Botwin
I fear this is becoming widespread enough that one day it might fall victim to the Permanent Red Link Club, just like Did Not Do The Research.
Can people just stop using this word? It's just not funny anymore.
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I disagree. There is nothing wrong with using that word, and not all people who use it do it for humorous reasons. It's just a word, after all, not really different from any other word. There is absolutely no reason not to use it.
Terry Pratchett uses it both appropriately nd with humour.
Oxford and Cambridge Universities have Regious Professors -ie, in the old archaic sense of outstanding in their academic field. (Stephen Hawking is Regious Professor of Physics, as was Isaac Newton before him).
Douglas Adams lampshades this in one of the Dirk Gently novels, the one based on the lost Dr Who episode Shada..
Unseen University on Pratchett's Discworld has Egregious Professors - a lovely and spot-on pun.
Edited by AgProv Male, early sixties, Cranky old fart, at least two decades behind. So you have been warned. Functionally illiterate in several languages.
I find the first remark in the archive a little strange; according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, the derivation is from ex gregaris, "not of the flock". Yes, it comes from the same Latin root as "gregarious", but with an "ex" (not) tacked on.
I think this page needs expanding slightly; the original meaning of this word was "so wonderful as to be above the common herd", and it seems to only fairly recently (within the last 60 or 70 years?) have gained its more common current meaning of "so bad as to be rejected by the herd". I suspect that Douglas Adams, when he had Dirk Gently use the word to describe the Professor in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, was probably using it in the original sense.
It's almost certain that George Orwell, in the page quote, was guilty of hypocrisy; the Hogben passage he quoted uses the word "egregious" in the negative sense, but Orwell appears to have assumed that it only has the positive meaning.
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I can't answer the other bits, but the Concise Oxford Dictionary is flat-out wrong. "Ex" is a preposition that means "out of" or "from," giving a literal meaning of, as you noted, "out of the common herd" (in much the same way we use the English word "outstanding"). The only Latin words ever used for "not" are non and ne (and their derivatives).
Here's what the full OED says:
Etymology: < Latin ēgregi-us, < ē out + grex, greg-is flock + -ous : hence lit., towering above the flock.
Also it has this quote from 1573 for the negative usage:
"Thai them selvs cannot dissemble it without egregius impudenci"
So it doesn't seem to be a modern thing.
Edited by JorWat Maths and alcohol don't mix, so don't drink and derive.
Come on, guys, it's learnéd. With an acute accent. If you're trying to make fun of people pretending to be smarter than they really are, you should at least not make the same mistake. I'm leaving it there for the irony.
It’s almost as if word’s meanings change over time, and that those changed meanings can have broader usage than others, and that both are natural functions of an ever changing language.