English will never be something I fully understand
In: 9830
Terrific used to mean “causing terror” but it was largely used as a term of emphasis, slowly detaching from the root word “terror”. (For example, I’ve seen examples in old literature like the expression “a terrific noise” to mean a noise that inspires terror, but also, the term could be used to describe just a really loud noise, even if the noise is not specifically terror inducing.) Then, that term of emphasis began to be used indiscriminately, as if it were neutral and usable for both good and bad. With people forgetting what the original usage was, the meaning drifted because people only remembered the use of this emphasis for emphasis on positive things.
Linguistic drift happens like that. Consider how we got expressions like “What the fuck?!” Originally, that expression was not used, and people said things like “What in the Hell?!” as if to say that something they were witnessing were so terrible or intense or shocking that it must have emerged out of Hell. (Even this is a more intense version of the expression “what on earth?”, for things which are so terrible that “earth” won’t cut it.) This was back when society was much more religious, and “Hell”, the place of eternal damnation and agony, the place of everlasting torment and burning punishment for the wicked, demons, and fallen angels, was a pretty intense thing to say, and was almost treated like a swear word, or at least not to be said outside of specific religious invocations of the term. The term got shortened to “What the Hell?!” But over time, as society became less religious, “Hell” lost its taboo edge, and another term that was still taboo, “fuck”, got substituted for “Hell”, giving us the modern expression “what the fuck” even though it the expression itself is rather nonsensical.
“Terrific” seems to have lost its edge the way “Hell” has. And in the same way, you even see “Hell” drifting away from its original meaning and used for intensification (even if it is positive), in expressions like “hell-yeah!” and sayings like “that was a hell of a performance” (which is using ‘hell’ for positive emphasis), or even the Oakland term of emphasis “hella”, whereas this expression would not have been acceptable around polite company back when “Hell” was not a polite thing to casually say.
Latest Answers