• silly •
Pronunciation: si-li • Hear it!Part of Speech: Adjective
Meaning: 1. Foolish, frivolous, dippy, ditzy, goofy, sappy. 2. Dazed, stunned, befuddled.
Notes: The adverb for this adjective, sillily, itself sounds so silly that few people dare use it, preferring instead to drop one of the li's and speak the naked adjective, as 'to behave silly'. On the other hand, we hear the noun, silliness, as often as we see silliness around us. If you are speaking of silly children at play, you may say that they have the sillies, as though it were a disease.
In Play: Silliness is a milder form of stupidity, so today's Good Word may be used without offending people the way stupid does: "Mortimer, take that lampshade off your head; you look silly!" Mortimer might be asked (or told) to stop acting silly, too. The application of the second meaning of this word is rather narrowly limited to a few verbs referring to actions capable of stunning or dazing: "Mortimer was so mortified by his wife's demand to remove the lampshade that he drank himself silly and passed out on the couch."
Word History: Today's Good Word was inherited from Middle English seli "blessed, innocent, hapless", itself a reduction of Old English gesælig "blessed, happy". This word came from the same root as Modern German selig "blessed, happy", the Proto-Indo-European root sel- "happy". Over the years from PIE to Modern English, the meaning of this word slipped from "happy" to "blessed" to "blissful" to "blissfully unaware" to where it is today, "foolish". Since initial PIE [s] converted to [h] in Greek, we are not surprised to discover that the same root emerged in that language as hilaros "cheerful", a word borrowed into English as hilarious. In Latin it arose in solari "to comfort", the root of English solace. (We are blissfully happy that Jeremy Busch recommended today's bit of silliness for our Good Word series.)