John Prescott, so Dominic Sandbrook observed last week, ‘infamously exchanged punches with a protestor in full view of the cameras’. My husband has just chipped in to say that it was the best thing he ever did: he’d had an egg thrown at him and responded with a neat left jab. But even if one disapproved, was that punch an act of infamy?
I saw the same adverb used recently of Liam Byrne, the chief secretary to the Treasury in 2010, who ‘infamously wrote the “I’m afraid there is no money” note’. Admittedly he has since said that the act ‘was not just stupid. It was offensive.’ To me it was humorous, and true.
But the meaning of infamously has shifted recently. The Oxford English Dictionary calls it ‘a very strong adverb of reprobation’ meaning ‘disgracefully, atrociously, detestably’. Curiously, two of its illustrative quotations contain the phrase ‘infamously famous’, one in reference to Count Julian, the renegade Christian governor of Ceuta credited with enabling the Muslim invasion of Spain in 711. I can see that his behaviour might have been regarded as infamous in a way that is lacking from the observation: ‘The countryside in this part of the world is infamously flat.’ That is an example given by the Cambridge Dictionary of the meaning ‘in a way that is famous because of something bad’. Being flat may be bad in a landscape, but not so very bad.
In the Times the other day Le Creuset dishes were described as ‘infamously heavy, particularly when full of hot food’. Here, there hardly seems anything bad about being heavy. They are famously heavy.
So we seem to have lost the element of strong condemnation. At the same time infamously is recruited to indicate minor failings: infamously rainy, infamously untidy. They might as well be qualified by the adverb famously, just as John Prescott famously lashed out.
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