fabulous

Praise with the fable worn away: the marvel of the "astonishing" sense has faded into plain enthusiasm. It is slang, at home in conversation but out of place in formal or academic prose, where outstanding or excellent serve better. It compares with more and most, so the forms are more fabulous and most fabulous, never a form with an added -er or -est ending.

A step away from legend toward wonder: the marvel keeps its fable-sized scale but need not be untrue. Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) speaks of "fabulous forces" met on the hero's road, a phrase that sits right on the border with the mythical sense. A useful test is that if the thing really exists but stretches belief, as a fortune can, the word means astonishing rather than legendary.

Where the general praise sense rates how good something is, this one rates how it looks and how it is staged, as with a gown, a party or an entrance. It keeps close company with celebrity culture and shares ground with the camp sense, so it carries a hint of deliberate display. It is slang, and in formal description glamorous or stylish says the same thing plainly.

The root of every later meaning: Late Middle English took the word from Latin fābulōsus, "celebrated in fable," and it is simply fable with -ous attached. Here the fable is still literal. A fabulous beast like the griffin is one that lives in legend, not in the world. When the creature or event belongs to myth, this is the sense in play, and the other meanings grow out of it.

Gay slang gave this sense its warmth: used within the community, it approves a flamboyant, theatrical style and turns effeminacy from a charge into a kind of confident self-presentation. Because it is an in-group term of affection, its tone depends heavily on who is speaking and to whom. Among friends it celebrates the person it describes.