Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 15 January 2005

A Lexicographer writes

issue 15 January 2005

It might seem a little early to say so, but if there’s one word this year can do without, it is edgy. It has become a cliché and people seem to use it without any discernible meaning. Both characteristics no doubt go together.

I was brought up to take edgy as meaning ‘irritable, on edge, nervous’. Those are the latest of the established meanings, it having escaped the attention of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, though the supplements later supplied a sample from the 1830s.

A sense in which I have never used edgy is ‘having the outlines too hard’, with reference to a painting. ‘There were two Holbeins, flat, shadowless, edgy compositions.’ That is neither mysterious nor laudatory, but the sense could, I suppose, somehow be nudged into something praiseworthy, as not being soft.

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