Today’s post on word misuse is a tricky one to write. The word is “infamous,” and the difficulty is that I can’t tell what people even mean when they misuse it. Merriam-Webster’s main definition is “having a reputation of the worst kind : notoriously evil.” The additional definitions are closely related: “causing or bringing infamy” and “convicted of an offense bringing infamy.” If you call a person infamous, you’re saying that person is rotten, vile, and contemptible. If you call an act infamous, you’re condemning it.
People seem to toss the word around just to add emphasis, with no specific meaning. I just saw a link on YouTube to a short referring to a statement attributed to J. Robert Oppenheimer, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” as “infamous.” I suppose someone might condemn Oppenheimer for saying that, though I don’t know why, but the video doesn’t do that.
If anything in this situation should be called infamous, it’s YouTube shorts. You can’t pause them, and if you scroll down looking for more information, the page starts playing a different video. YouTube has designed them to make people’s short attention spans even shorter. From what I could gather before losing track of the video, the presenter was just explaining why the statement uses the verb “to be,” why it’s “I am become” rather than “I have become.” But he’s not saying Oppenheimer was an illiterate ignoramus. He just notes that many European languages use “to be” this way, and English used to more than it does now.
Update: A Wired article also considers the quote infamous. The author discusses Oppenheimer’s interest in Hinduism but doesn’t express contempt for the words.
Why do people use “infamous” as a vague mark of emphasis? Because it gets attention, I suppose. It’s clickbait. People want to find out why something is considered infamous, so they click on the link, just as I did. Sometimes people use the word in a humorous, ironic way, especially when talking about people whose interests border on obsessions, but that’s a different matter.