the changing meaning of a word

I’m thinking of the word “entitlement,” in sentences like this one, referring to the Boston Red Sox:

“One of the most enviable franchises in baseball has been reduced to a fast-food punch line; a blueprint for excess, arrogance and entitlement.”

The 1970’s gave us “manipulative” as a new word to describe the psychology of others, and that one stuck. (I’m pretty sure it was the 1970’s, because I saw a TV interview with Norman Mailer from that time in which Mailer had to explain to the interviewer what he meant by that word; it was just catching on. The interviewer mispronounced it, even.)

The 1980’s gave us “passive-aggressive” and (for awhile) “anal retentive.” The first of these stuck, while the latter was initially shortened to “anal,” but isn’t really used that much anymore, whereas passive-aggressive is probably one of the 200 most common phrases in everyday language.

Now, we’re seeing a change in meaning of the word “entitlement.” It used to mean, straightforwardly, that someone legitimately was entitled to something. But then, from about the early 1990’s (the first time I heard this happen), we all began to complain that certain people had “a sense of entitlement.” It was a sense of entitlement, though– a false sense of deserving something.

But now that qualification is slipping away, and we’re starting to see sentences like the one at the top of this post:

“One of the most enviable franchises in baseball has been reduced to a fast-food punch line; a blueprint for excess, arrogance and entitlement.”

The passage doesn’t claim that the Red Sox are entitled to anything, but quite the opposite– that they falsely assume that they are. But “entitlement,” at least in spoken American English (the Brits won’t follow, and so the gap will slowly widen a bit more), seems to be on the verge of becoming a negative word in its own right. These shifts in usage don’t always last, but often they do.