Egregious

(adj.), flagrantly bad, outrageously offensive

Usage: In threatening India with retaliation if we didn’t sell him our stocks of hydroxychloroquine, President Trump behaved egregiously, in a manner unworthy of a Head of State. believe it slipped out like that!”

Egregious is the only word that will do for behaviour that goes even beyond outrageous: “When the party President informed X that a trusted aide, in a shocking development, had defected to the other side, instead of sympathising, X’s egregious response was to ask if she could then have his office at the party headquarters.” The license of a bar in Kerala was suspended for the “egregious violation” of selling alcohol to minors. It was an “egregious mistake” on the minister’s part to quote misleading statistics in a press conference which could easily be refuted by a factcheck. Or, “He is such an egregious liar that if he told me the sun was shining, I would be tempted to look out of the window to check.”

Of course, some centuries ago, the old positive meaning of the word persisted, so that the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes could use it in complimenting a colleague when he remarked, “I am not so egregious a mathematician as you are.” Indeed, in some other Indo-european languages that is still the way the word is used: for instance, in Italian, t he word “e g r e g i o ” means “most excellent” and figures in the formal salutation ‘Egregio S i g nor e ’ , meaning “Your Excellency” or “Distinguished Sir”. For some 200 years, linguistics experts tell us, both the positive and negative meanings ran in parallel, so that Christopher Marlowe, in his Tamburlaine in 1590, used it in the sense of ‘distinguished’ (“Egregious viceroys of these eastern parts”), while in 1611 Shakespeare has Posthumus describe himself in Cymbeline in the disparaging sense, as an “Egregious murderer”. This would certainly have been pretty confusing for everyone, so it was inevitable that one meaning would win out in the usage battles, and for the last couple of centuries, at least, the strongly negative meaning of “egregious” as something shockingly bad has prevailed.

And finally, for trivia lovers: egregious is an unusually vowelled word, containing all the vowels of the alphabet (except a, but doubling up one to make up for it!). One more reason it’s worth adding to your vocabulary!