An old friend of The Scrapbook’s posted on Facebook the other day an oblique commentary on this year’s campaign: “I used to like the word ‘tremendous’ and not know the word ‘bigly.’ Those were happy days.”
If you listened closely to the presidential debate last week, you will catch the reference. As he has done before, Donald Trump seemed to be deploying an unusual word. “I’m going to cut taxes bigly, and you’re going to raise taxes bigly,” he told his opponent. Or did he? Number two son, Eric Trump, weighed in afterwards, insisting Dad had said “big league”—not “bigly.”
The Scrapbook was sorry to read this bit of spin because, as we told our friend, bigly is in fact a hugely entertaining word, one we anticipate dropping into conversations to amusing effect for years to come.
The biased mainstream media, by the way, sometimes call bigly a neologism, but as usual they’re misleading and wrong! According to our Oxford English Dictionary, the word is a venerable one if (at least until this summer) obsolete. The OED definition is to the point: “Loudly, boastfully, haughtily, pompously.” And the lexicographers trace its earliest written use all the way back to the “Pearl Poet” in 14th-century Middle English—”the barrez of vche a bonk ful bigly me haldes”—which we crudely translate as “the bars of such a bank held me full bigly.” Later citations are more memorable: “Goliath thought bigly of himself.” “Oftentimes Authoritie lookes biglier than a Bull.” “Talking bigly, indeed, of vindicating foreign rights.” And, finally (in 1846), “He spoke as bigly and fiercely as a soaken yeoman at an election feast.”
There will no doubt be many reasons to get soaken at this year’s election feast, but the revival of bigly will stand out, for The Scrapbook anyway, as one of the rare, redeeming features of this year’s campaign.
