I’m sure I can’t remember hearing it used wrongly before, and now I’ve heard it twice in a fortnight from politicians. Perhaps they catch it from each other.
The phrase in question is in extremis and it has been used as if it meant ‘extremely’ or ‘in extreme circumstances’. In truth it means ‘on the point of death’, as the OED records. The earliest citation is from 1530, in a letter to Cardinal Wolsey about the Dean of St Paul’s, who was on his way out.
Well, that is the earliest citation in English, as it were, though it has long been used in Latin with this meaning. The same problem of whether or not we are talking Latin occurs with in memoriam, the earliest citation of which the OED gives from 1850, in the title of Tennyson’s well-known poem.
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