A date that will live in infamy.

Most will recognize the quote above as the opening of President Franklin Roosevelt’s description of the attack on Pearl Harbor. In fact, this word gets misused a lot. Just this morning I heard a travel show where the host talked about an island that was infamous for its flowers. She misused infamous as an intense version of famous. As Inigo Montoya would say, “You keep using that word, but I do not think it means what you think it does.”

The etymology of both words comes from the same root, but came to English individually from the French words, fameux and imfameux. Those words came from the Latin famis and infamis. Amusingly, the Oxford English dictionary puts the first citation of infamous a few years before the first appearance pf famous.

As we discussed in a previous article, sometimes the in- prefix is a negation and sometimes it is not. In this case, it is. Famous means celebrated, much talked about, or renowned. Infamous means ill-famed, essentially famous for the wrong reasons.

Interestingly, FDR didn’t originally have infamy in the message to Congress. The draft copy read “a date which will live in world history.”

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