In the same way as self-indulgence creeps over us by unmarked degrees, so there creeps over the words that designate it a subtle change; they come to contain less and less of rebuke and blame; the thing itself being tolerated, nay allowed, it must needs be that the words which express it should be received into favour too. It has been thus, as I shall have occasion to note, with ‘luxury;’ it has been thus also with this whole group of words. See the quotation from Sir W. Raleigh, s. v. ‘Feminine.’
Thus much of delicacy in general; now more particularly of his first branch, gluttony.—Nash, Christ’s Tear’s over Jerusalem, p. 140.
Cephisodorus, the disciple of Isocrates, charged him with delicacy, intemperance, and gluttony.—Blount, Philostratus, p. 229.
The most delicate and voluptuous princes have ever been the heaviest oppressors of the people, riot being a far more lavish spender of the common treasure than war or magnificence.—Habington, History of King Edward IV., p. 196.
And drynk nat ouer delicatliche, ne to depe neither.
Piers Plowman, C-text, Passus vii. 166 (Skeat).
She that liveth delicately [σπαταλῶσα] is dead while she liveth.—1 Tim. v. 6. A.V. (margin).
Yea, soberest men it [idleness] makes delicious.—Sylvester, Du Bartas, Second Week, Eden.
How much she hath glorified herself and lived deliciously [ἐστρηνίασε], so much torment and sorrow give her.—Rev. xviii. 7. (A.V.)
Demerit. It was plainly a squandering of the wealth of the language, that ‘merit’ and ‘demerit’ should mean one and the same thing; however this might be justified by the fact that ‘mereor’ and ‘demereor,’ from which they were severally derived, were scarcely discriminated in meaning. It has thus come to pass, according to the desynonymizing processes ever at work in a language, that ‘demerit’ has ended in being employed only of ill desert, while ‘merit’ is left free to good or ill, having predominantly the sense of the former.