It goes without saying that the English language is constantly changing, but while change is inevitable, some changes strike the ears of listeners as odd, even unwelcome. What’s surprising is that some of these odd changes to the language might, in fact, not be changes at all, but returns to older—potentially much older—forms of the language.
For example, recently, many grammarians and pundits have accused President Donald Trump of changing English for the worse by repeatedly using the curious word “bigly.” It should be noted that some insist that the president is actually saying “big league” (a homonym of “bigly” when the final “g” is not fully sounded) rather than the adverb “bigly.” But for the sake of argument, if the president has been saying “bigly,” is he wrong for doing so?
Well, yes and no.
Although not in common usage today, “bigly” is a word, but its origins are shrouded in mystery. Neither “big” nor “bigly” existed in Old English (spoken ca. 1150 and earlier), so it must be a later addition. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “bigly” was used as early as the last decades of the fourteenth century, and perhaps even earlier. Quite possibly, the word is related to the Norwegian noun bugge, meaning a “mighty man,” or bugga, an adjective suggesting wealth and power.
So, in its earliest usage, the term “bigly” had little, if anything, to do with physical size. Although the related Middle English word “big” could mean “great (in size),” it, too, seems rather to have meant “vigorously,” “strongly,” or even “boastfully,” much like “bigly.” So in a 1585 sermon, a certain Reverend E. Sandys felt comfortable in proclaiming that “Goliath thought bigly of himself,” and no one so much as raised an eyebrow. Of course, Goliath was physically big, but Sandys was more likely referring to the biblical giant’s boastfulness, and so he used the word “big” as a modifier for a verb rather than a noun: not big in size, but bigly in speaking!
So how did the adverb “bigly” fall out of widespread use to the point that the president could be mocked for supposedly ‘misusing’ the English language? Perhaps as its meaning shifted from describing the manner of some action to describing the quality of an object, its use as an adverb was no longer fitting; if this is true, then the –ly suffix would fall from the word, leaving us with “big” instead of “bigly.” So this is probably why “bigly” sounds so laughable to us: big has been used to describe objects, not actions, for so long, that to use the adverbial form to boast about “winning” seems more like a linguistic fail.
So always be careful before you accuse someone of misusing English, or you might fail bigly!
Thanks for listening to WKMS, and remember, use your words!
What’s the word is a new occasional series produced by the Murray State University Department of English and Philosophy that explores issues of the English language that are popping up in contemporary conversations.
