I was having trouble with this one; coming up with something off the top of my head. I know there are quite a few because I sometimes find myself upset that I can no longer use a perfectly good word because it means something else now … but I had an issue with this, this morning.
I was writing a little something about my recurring dreams and I have this one that’s sort of about alien invasions though I never see the aliens; their ships just start appearing in they sky and their spacecraft are always huge and crazy looking and I wanted to use the word “fantastic” to describe the spacecraft, in its first and primary meaning:
conceived or appearing as if conceived by an unrestrained imagination; odd and remarkable; bizarre; grotesque, based on fantasy : not real, conceived or seemingly conceived by unrestrained fancy, so extreme as to challenge belief
as defined here and here
but I felt like people wouldn’t understand it to mean that, because, unfortunately, at some point, that usage/meaning seems to have fallen completely out of favor and now most people, I think, use it and understand it to mean: excellent, superlative, etc. And its really a shame because none of the synonyms for fantastic quite do the job in my opinion; and English already has plenty of words that mean incredibly great, excellent, wonderful, terrific, etc. Why do we need another one and now leave ourselves with no word meaning exactly what “fantastic” used to and should mean?
It’s very sad!