If people are using literally non-literally, really gets your goat, you might be surprised

at the number of words you use yourself that now have very different meanings from the

ones they started with.

Grammar Girl here, I'm in Yon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.

Stick around because after we talk about a bunch of words with surprising etymologies,

we're going to talk about whether the word pre-order is redundant, and we'll end with

a family-led story that made me laugh out loud.

Here's our first word with a surprising history, bully.

In modern English, this word is far from what we'd call a term of endearment.

Instead, a bully, a person who harasses and intimidates others, has become the subject

of widespread anti-bullying campaigns at schools and workplaces.

But in a very unexpected twist, earlier in our history, a bully was a lover, not a fighter.

The word bully appears to have come into English from the middle Dutch word bold, B-O-E-L,

meaning lover of all things.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest citation for the English word bully

is from a comedy written by John Bale around 1548, where he describes a woman as mine-owned

sweet bully, followed by a reference to her pretty face.

In this period, bully was a term like deer or sweetheart, and could refer to anyone.

The word soon grew to be mainly a term used among men along the lines of a friendly

bro, one would say to his figurative brother.

You can find an example of this in Shakespeare's play a mid-summer night's dream, where

Peter Quince says to his fellow performer Nick Bottom, what sayest thou, bully bottom?

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