11 words whose meanings have completely changed over time

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From The Week:

Occasionally you will encounter someone with an etymological axe to grind. They insist that a certain word has to mean just what it meant hundreds of years ago when it was first spoken: For example, that decimate has to mean “kill exactly one tenth.” This is what’s known as the etymological fallacy. If you don’t feel like arguing with the person, here are 11 reasons you can just respond with “Nice!”

1. Nice

These days, we often say “Nice!” sarcastically to mean “That’s really ignorant!” If we traced the word nice back to its source, though, it wouldn’t be sarcastic at all. Today’s bland sense of “good” comes from the meaning “precise, fastidious” (still sometimes used, as in “a nice distinction”), which in turn came from a use in the 1400s to mean “overrefined, excessively delicate,” which was a narrowing down of the broader sense “foolish,” which is the meaning it had when it came into English via French from Latin. But the Latin original was nescius, which literally means “unknowing, ignorant.” And here we’ve all been using it without knowing where it came from. Nice!

2. Silly

So okay, nice comes from “ignorant.” Well, ignorance is bliss, right? Sure, and so is silliness… historically, at least. Silly started out as Old English sælig, “happy, blissful, fortunate” and by the 1200s it had gained the sense “blessed, pious,” which expanded to “innocent,” and then shifted to “pitiable” and so also “insignificant, poor.” By the 1500s it was being used to mean “ignorant, foolish,” and from there we got our more innocuous modern senses of “inane” and “giddy.”

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4. Throw

So why didn’t they just use throw to mean “throw”? Because — wait for it! — throw originally meant “twist.” Yeah, that’s right. That twisting motion your body makes when throwing? It may have led to this word for “twist” coming to mean “toss” — trading places with warp. If you’re wondering how people clearly spoke of the throwing motion while throw and warp were twisting around each other, the answer is that they mainly used cast.

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6. Awful

If down is up, good is bad, right? Well, awesome is awful, anyway. The word awful originally meant something rather like “awesome.” Its Old English form, egefull, meant “causing dread”; as ege became awe and came to mean not just “dread” but “profound respect,” awful came to mean “commanding profound respect or fear.” In the 1600s, it could mean “sublimely majestic” and was uttered as high praise to such things as a great cathedral. But a slang usage of awful to mean “monstrous, frightful, very ugly” caught on in the 1800s, and now it’s the only way you can use the word. A shadow of the original sense can be seen in our use of awfully to mean “very.”

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9. Surly

Not everyone was always impressed with the manners of the nobility, though. We may retain a certain respect for the kingly and lordly, but if we expand “ly” to all those called “sir” we run into sirly, which was respelled surly. At first it meant “lordly, majestic,” but then it got resentful and went downhill into “haughty, arrogant” and from that to “ill-tempered.”

Link to the rest at The Week and thanks to Matthew for the tip.