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Mind your language

Should we just stop using ‘fulsome’?

The ‘correct’ usage is used by hardly anyone. But it makes the common usage impossible too

29 October 2015

9:00 AM

29 October 2015

9:00 AM

It’s funny that two much misused words end in —some: fulsome and noisome. Noisome is the less often used at all, and then usually as though it meant noisy. There is a word noisesome that does mean noisy, coined 80 years ago, but noisome has meant ‘unpleasant’ or ‘offensive’, especially ‘smelly’, for 400 years or more.

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