Flocking

In the course of perusing coverage of Tory sleaze and of wondering why on earth our fat leader squandered so much political capital on defending the indefensible, I was moved to ask Bing, then Webster's, then the OED, what exactly was meant by the word 'egregious'.

First point, like its relative 'gregarious', the word comes from the Latin word 'grex' for a flock, perhaps of sheep or goats. So in the first instance, the word simply meant standing out from the flock, by extension standing out from the common run of things. Perhaps simply prominent, in the way of a promontory.

Second, the word came to have a positive tone. Applied to something that was standing out in a good way. So the St. Faith of the previous post (reference 1) might be said to have been a person of egregious faith.

Third, perhaps by the eighteenth century, certainly by the middle of the nineteenth century, the word came to have a negative tone, not present in the Latin original. Applied to something that was standing out in a bad way. OED does not attempt to offer an explanation of this reversal of polarity, but does suggest that this is about the only sense in which the word is now much used.

The exception being the pastoral pedants who like to talk of egregious sheep, that is to say sheep who have strayed from the flock.

PS: just to confuse things, flocking is not usually flocks of sheep at all, rather a particular sort of decorative material - or possibly a finish for wallpaper - made with odds and ends of wool. Making use of what might otherwise have been thrown away.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/11/wellingtonia-54.html.