"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 28/02/18 (literally, enormity, mediocre)

I'm going to talk about words which have almost completely lost their original meaning. So pedants would say, and I use pedant in a neutral sense, possibly, would say that we're using them in the wrong way but English, as we know, moves very quickly. So we can't always have what we want. "Literally" - our floor manager was saying how much he hates the use of literally to mean figuratively, so the complete opposite. Unfortunately, that version is now in the dictionary, much to a lot of people's disgust. not the primary meaning but one that is  used in informal speach. Enormity is another one that we use in a wrong way. I say it wrong in inverted commas. Enormity first meant something that was really wicked or vicious in some way. That's because a norma was a carpenter's square. So anything that was normal confirmed to absolutely perfect angles. It was correct, it was stright and it followed convention, if you like. Enormous then started to mean something that was abnormal and because it was abnormal, as I say, it was wicked and completely wrong. It's only much, much later that it began to mean something that was large in size but enormity has kept that bad meaning. So, strictly speaking, we should talk about enormousness if we are talking about the greatness of size of something. But the one I was going to concentrate on was mediocre. Because, mediocre, if we talk about the quiality of something being mediocre at best, it's never going to be very good. It's become byword for shoddy. But actually simply meant originally something that was of moderate quality. So it was neither all the way p, hor all the way down. It was borrowed from Latin, it came over with the Norman conquerors. It meant at a middle height. The "medi" meant medium and "ocris" meant actually ragged mountain, which means, in fact, that mediocre is linked ethymologically to a whole host of English words. We've got Acacia tree with its sharp thorns. Acerbic acid. Acme, the summit of something. Acne - spots which look perhaps like a little mountains on the skin. Acrobat, acropolis, acronym. Aglet, the tip of a shoelace. But if we were to stay true to the heart with mediocre, we would be using that for something that's OK. It's just your standerd quality - neinter good, nor bad.