Wicked is a Very Fine Intensifying Adverb if You’re a New Englander

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, yes.

My name’s Penny Grieb. I’m calling from Pauly’s Island, South Carolina.

Hi, Penny.

Hi.

I was wondering about the word wicked that we use in New England, where I grew up, pretty much to describe everything. We’re either wicked cold or wicked sick or, you know, that’s wicked fatigo. And when I moved, when I was in eighth grade to New Jersey, I realized that that’s not a word that everyone else uses. And I’m just wondering how it started, where it came from.

Wicked far, huh? New Jersey’s wicked far. Where in New England were you?

Well, I grew up in New Hampshire, southern New Hampshire, a little town called New Boston. And the rest of my family lived in Maine. So I started in Maine and then we moved to southern New Hampshire.

Yeah. And you’re using it as an adverb to modify adjectives, which is not how a whole lot of other people use it. Because, you know, wicked as an adjective, of course, describes something bad or evil. And that’s been around since, gosh, the 13th century. But yeah, what about this use of wicked meaning exceedingly? It evolves sort of the same way that we say that something’s terribly cold. And we see in print scattered examples of use of wicked being used as an adverb as well. You see that off and on for a few hundred years, but it really seemed to take off in the 20th century, particularly in Maine. And then it sort of seeped down into Massachusetts. And it’s not really clear why it lodged in the language in the northeastern U.S. But certainly by the 70s, it was part of pop culture in Massachusetts. And it became sort of a point of pride among people in Boston and Massachusetts and larger New England as well.

You remember the film Good Will Hunting back in the 90s. You know, when the guy says, my boy is wicked smart.

Yeah.

We say that all the time.

Yeah.

He’s wicked smart. Wicked smart.

Yeah.

But, yeah, it’s odd the way that it seems to have slipped down from Maine and stuck a little bit farther south.

Yeah. It used to exclusively be talked about as a Maine thing. If you go back to the early days of wicked being used as an adverb, people didn’t associate it very much with Boston. They talked about it as a Maine item. So in these small informal dictionaries and little glossaries that people would put together. And then it just kind of slowly moved to Boston. But part of that might have to do with the kind of contraction of the larger speech dialect of the Northeast slowly being concentrated on Boston. The map of the Northeast is slowly, slowly shrinking to be about Boston as the dialect regions change up there.

Martha, you mentioned terribly and awfully these other adverbs. All three of these are negative words that lost their negative value. They underwent semantic bleaching, and what was left behind was their emphatic force. So we don’t mean them in a negative way anymore. There’s nothing pejorative left. All that’s left is kind of the punch and the wow, right?

Yeah, I can see that.

This was a wicked good call, Penny. We really appreciate you talking to us.

Well, I appreciate a little bit of history on it, and I like that it started in Maine because that’s where I’m originally from.

Well, at least it was more prominent there in the beginning. I don’t know about started. It’s murky origins. How about we just say New England?

New England, okay. You can clean that.

Take care of yourself. Call us again sometime, all right?

Thank you so much. I had a good time.

Bye.