Word of the Week! Fulsome Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Fulsome Richmond Writing This word has bothered me for many years. It provides a good example of Edward Sapirs theory of Linguistic Drift, and I warn writers to take care when using this intellectual-sounding adjective. It has drifted from a positive sense to a negative one and back to positive again! Often I hear journalists on radio, or more likely corporate or governmental officials, describing the fulsome praise heaped upon this or that person. Theres a problem here; these speakers mean generous or universal when one older meaning of fulsome is, in fact, a little stinky.   If we add the verb heaped it all becomes, well, piled higher and deeper in its fulsomeness. The word is English and it is very old. The OED Online cites uses from as early as the 14th Century, and this lovely example a century closer to us, As a fulsome well Shedith his stream in to þe ryvere can be updated to, as a fulsome well sheds its stream into the river.   Here the sense is copious, overflowing, positive.   And therein lies a problem with fulsome, as well as its closeness, phonetically, to the unabashedly bad foul. The OED notes that fulsome acquired a dubious reputation thanks to that kinship, though in recent years the positive aspect of fulsome   gained more usage. A 19th Century example from the OED helps, My complaint of the world..is thisâ€"that there is too much of everything..and so I could go on enumerating..all the things which are too full in this fulsome world. I use fulsome in the original sense. In this original sense, fulsome means too much of a good thing. It is one thing to be praised, another entirely to be fawned over by a sycophant. That sense of excess takes us to the OEDs other definitions. They include fleshy, obnoxious, overfed, lewd, bawdy, dirty, difficult to digest, filthy!   In my minds eye I immediately envisioned the engravings of William Hogarth, whose Tavern Scene from the series The Rakes Progress appears above.   Try as I might, we are back to Spring Break Bacchanalia, after all! An 1828 example from the OED is the close, hot, fulsome smell of bad ventilation. My 1953 edition of   Websters New Collegiate gives no positive definitions, emphasizing only the offensive nature of the term. My more recent American Heritage Dictionary, a volume that includes usage notes, warns readers about the double-edged meaning of our word of the week. We have lost most derogatory senses of the word, along with the noun form of fulsome, but I remain uncomfortable when I hear about fulsome praise, perhaps the last holdout of a word that describes excess in all its forms. Again, I am reminded of Hogarths satirical drawings. The Rakes Progress did not end well. We have here not a question of grammar or even proper usage but rather of precise usage. So the next time you plan to honor someone who had received a reward, you might instead talk or write about universal praise, widely praised, acclaimed, or greatly honored. I, for one, would leave fulsome behind, unless you want to poke fun at someone being followed around by a platoon of yes-men. Update, 3/26/18: I took a peek at Bryan Garners excellent A Dictionary of American Usage for advice. He calls fulsome a skunked term, meaning that the scent of its earlier (in this case, negative) meaning clings to it for a long time. Garner suggests lavish as an alternative adjective when speaking of praise. Nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. See all of our Words of the Week here. Hogarth image courtesy of The Victorian Web.