"Horrible" as a noun?

[Joel S. Berson]

We should remember that the OED has "horribles"
(noun) from 1726 -- and an outlier in the singular from c1540.
    1726    D. Defoe Polit. Hist. Devil ii. vi.
265   Among all the Horribles that we dress up Satan in.

Joel

At 1/26/2011 06:32 PM, George Thompson wrote:
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>A NYC newspaper of 1836 used "terrible" as a count noun in a column heading.
>
>Accidents, freshets, crimes, casualties and
>other horrors. [headline; brief snippets of out-of-town news]
>NY Times, April 29, 1836, p. 2, col. 2;
>Condensed account of horrors. [the same]  NY
>Times, May 23, 1836, p. 2, col. 3;
>List of Terribles. [bad news from out-of-town]
>NY Times, June 11, 1836, p. 2, col. 4
>
>(This is not the present-day NYTimes, or ancestral to it.)
>
>These are the only items I noted, but I think it
>was the papers regular way of heading the bad
>news from out-of-town, so "horribles" might well have been used, too.
>
>GAT
>
>George A. Thompson
>Author of A Documentary History of "The African
>Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Baker, John" <JMB at STRADLEY.COM>
>Date: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 9:10 pm
>Subject: Re: "Horrible" as a noun?
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> >         "Parade of horribles," a listing of the negative effects to be
> > expected from a legal or policy position that one opposes, is a
> > standard term among lawyers.  Ben Zimmer's Language Log posting
> > mentions its use in 2002, but it was frequently used by my law
> > professors in the early 1980s, and the example below from 1982 is
> > clearly the same thing.  Note that you can never have just one
> > horrible of this type, although you can have one horrible after another.
> >
> >
> > John Baker
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On
> > Behalf Of Jocelyn Limpert
> > Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 7:39 PM
> > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> > Subject: "Horrible" as a noun?
> >
> > I've been informed that "horrible" is being used as a noun in a soon-to-be
> > published book, a possible best seller.
> >
> > Does anyone know who coined this usage and if it is now in fairly common
> > usage?  Had anyone heard it much?
> >
> > I found the following at diffen.com
> >
> > *horrible as a Noun* The use of "horrible" as a noun is fairly rare. A
> > person wearing a funny or gross costume in a parade of
> > horribles<is called
> > *a horrible*.
> >
> > Read more: Horrible vs Horrific - Difference and Comparison |
> > Diffen<
> > http://www.diffen.com/difference/Horrible_vs_Horrific#ixzz1C65P7gQK
> >
> >
> > I found the following in Wikipedia:
> > Noun
> >
> > *horrible* (*plural* *horribles<
> > *)
> >
> >    1. A thing that causes horror <; a
> >    terrifying < thing, particularly
> >    a prospective bad consequence asserted as likely to result from an
> > act.
> >     [quotations ⭲]
> >       - *1851*, Herman Melville, *Moby Dick* *Here's a carcase. I know
> > not
> >       all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it
> > laughing. Such
> >       a waggish leering as lurks in all your horribles!*
> >       - *1982*, United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, *The
> >       Genocide Convention: Hearing Before the
> Committee on Foreign Relations,
> >       United States Senate* *A lot of the possible horribles conjured
> > up by
> >       the people objecting to this convention ignore the plain
> > language of this
> >       treaty.*
> >       - *1991*, Alastair Scott, *Tracks Across Alaska: A Dog Sled
> > Journey* *The
> >       pot had previously simmered skate wings, cods' heads, whales,
> > pigs' hearts
> >       and a long litany of other horribles.*
> >       - *2000*, John Dean, CNN
> > interview<,
> >       January 21, 2000: *I'm trying to convince him that the criminal
> >       behavior that's going on at the White House has to end. And I
> > give him one
> >       horrible after the next. I just keep raising them. He sort of swats
> >       them away.*
> >       - *2001*, Neil K. Komesar, *Law's Limits: The Rule of Law and the
> >       Supply and Demand of Rights* *Many scholars have demonstrated these
> >       horribles and contemplated significant limitations on class actions.*
> >
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>
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