This Article Is Wicked Interesting | Only In Massachusetts

Only In Massachusetts is an occasional series where Patch tries to find answers to questions about life in Massachusetts. Have a question about the Bay State that needs answering? Send it to dave.copeland@patch.com.

The natural follow-up for a column on "Why do Bostonians drop their R's?" is"Why do people in eastern Massachusetts and other parts of New England use the word 'wicked' as a synonym for 'very'?"

As in "It's wicked rainy and kind of cold as I write this, but, in another month or two, it will be wicked hot."

To get to the answer, you first need to dispel a couple of myths:

• Our use of wicked has nothing to do with the Salem witch trials: While the word itself seems to have evolved from the "wicca," the Middle English word for witch, using it as a modifier meaning very doesn't really take off in these parts until the 1960s. When the word "wicked" was used during the Salem witch trials in 1692 and 1693, it was under the traditional definition of "evil."
• It also has nothing to do with former Boston Mayor James Michael Curley's 1942 run for the U.S. House of Representatives: Curley's campaign was upended by his affair with Margaret Hamilton, who had just finished a run starring in a stage production of "The Wizard of Oz" as the Wicked Witch of the West. When Curley broke off the affair, his supporter Cardinal William Henry O'Connell declared "Our wicked man has become wicked good!"

I'm a big fan of the Curley myth and was hoping that "wicked" as a modifier was yet another thing we could add to the long list of things — good and wicked, in the traditional sense — that he added to Bay State culture.

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But the reality is the use of "wicked" as we know it doesn't really take off until the 1960s. The Dictionary of American Regional English points to "Let's Try Barter: the Answer to Inflation — and the Tax Collector," a 1960 book by Charles Morrow Wilson that includes the line "Justin Persons never spent time or brawn drilling into that wicked hard granite mountain," as the first example of using "wicked" to mean "very" in print.

By 1981, according to DARE, the term was so common Seventeen Letters explained it to its young readers like this: "The word 'wicked' when used by teens in New England, particularly the Massachusetts, Greater Boston area, does not mean evil or bad, but 'very' or 'extra' in such phrases as 'wicked cute'...or 'wicked hard'."

The best clue came from Helen Bender, the branch librarian at Boston Public Library's West End Branch, who pointed me to the Oxford English Dictionary. OED notes Thomas Porter wrote "Yesterday...was a wicked hot day" in 1663's "A Witty Combat, Or, The Female Victor: A Trage-comedy: as it was Acted by Persons of Quality in Whitson-week with Great Applause."

Porter wasn't from Boston, but his use of "wicked" in 1663 sounds a lot like a Boston kid would have used it in 1963 (and 2021, for that matter). Merriam-Webster suggests the transformation of "wicked" into a modifier (and Porter's use) comes from the Puritans' practice of attributing an intense quality to a supernatural force or curse. As in, if it's just "hot," it's nature. But if it's "wicked hot," somebody must have cast a curse on the region.

"A possible interpretation is that adverbial wicked was a literal extension of its adjective sense—something that was wicked fast, for example, might have been to such a degree that seemed the result of a curse or supernatural force," Merriam-Webster notes in its usage notes for wicked.

In 2012, Ben T. Smith of Dialect Blog noted that a number of adjectives were transferred into adverbs by English speakers in the U.S. in the 19th century. Think "awful" and "awfully" or "terrible" and "terribly." He notes books from just before timeframe that included lines like "It is a terrible cold frost" and "we had a terrible hard fighting on the 13th."

Smith suggests people in New England may have applied the same practice to "wicked" and, unlike the examples for "terrible" above, the use of wicked "appears to be one of the last survivors of this class in American English."

"Yet I can find few 19th-Century examples of ‘wicked’ being used this way," Smith writes as he concludes the origin of New Englanders using of wicked for very is unclear. "Certainly not in New England: I can locate no such ‘wickeds’ in the work of Alcott, nor in Hawthorne, nor in Melville (a New Yorker, but admissible to the New England literary pantheon on the strength of Moby Dick)."

In other words, why we use "wicked" when we mean "very" remains wicked unclear.

Dave Copeland is Patch's regional editor for Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island and can be reached at dave.copeland@patch.com or by calling 617-433-7851. Follow him on Twitter (@CopeWrites) and Facebook (/copewrites).