Lousy

Lousy , like filthy, dirty , and flea-pit , originally had a literal significance, meaning “infested with lice,” exemplified in the medieval author William Langland’s reference to “a lousi hatte” in Piers Plowman (B v 195). A number of idiomatic phrases confirm the presence of lice in previous times: Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) has louse-bag , “a black bag worn to the hair or wig”; louse-house for a prison cell; louse-ladder , “a stitch fallen in a stocking”; and louse land , a prejudicial name for Scotland.

However, the modern figurative use of lousy , meaning “worthless,” “inferior,” or “contemptible” is of surprising antiquity, being first recorded in Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale , when the sinister devil-figure says “A lowsy jogelour kan deceyve thee,” meaning “a second-rate juggler can trick you” (l. 1467). In Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599) the excitable Welshman Fluellen condemns a supposed traitor profusely: “What an arrant, rascally, beggarly, lousy knave it is” (IV viii 35). Since then the word has greatly generalized to apply to anything unpleasant or disliked, to the point that it has driven the literal meaning out of currency. For instance, the phrase “a lousy paltry, sum of money” sounds modern, but is found in 1663 in John Dryden’s play The Wild Gallant (I i). In the same period louse was already in use as a term of personal contempt.

In American English the phrase lousy with meaning “having a great deal of” has become extremely common, on the analogy of crawling with . It is not only used of undesirable things: “He was lousy with money” is recorded in 1843 in The Spirit of the Times (March 4), and Sacramento was described at the time of the Gold Rush as being “lousy with gold.” Indeed, the use became so common in the Gold Rush that Andy Gordon complained in his diary (July 12, 1849) that he wished never to hear the word again. The American variety has also regenerated louse as a term of personal contempt. All these senses are found in South African English, while Australian usage includes the different meaning of “mean or tight-fisted.” The journal American Speech asked the question: “How long will the vogue for this unpleasant adjective continue? It is applied indiscriminately and means nothing in particular except that it is always a term of disparagement.” That was in 1928 (Vol. III, 345)