boel

Bully most likely derives from Dutch boel, meaning 'lover, sweetheart,' possibly from Middle High German buole ('lover, close relative'). When the word entered English in the sixteenth century, it meant 'sweetheart' — a bully was a beloved person, a darling, someone held in the highest affection. From there it shifted to 'fine fellow, admirable person,' a usage that survives in the American expression 'bully for you,' meaning 'good for you, well done,' and in Theodore Roosevelt's famous declaration that the presidency was a 'bully pulpit' — a splendid platform, not a threatening one. The word was warm, approving, affectionate.

The transformation from 'fine fellow' to 'intimidating brute' appears to have passed through an intermediate stage of 'blustering, swaggering person.' A fine fellow who knows he is fine may become boastful. A boastful person who has power may become domineering. A domineering person who targets the weak becomes, in the modern sense, a bully. The semantic logic is the logic of corruption: the qualities that make someone admirable — confidence, strength, presence — become, in excess, the qualities that make someone frightening. The word tracked the path from confidence to cruelty, and by the late seventeenth century, a bully was no longer someone you loved but someone you fled from.

Shakespeare used bully in its older, positive sense. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bottom addresses his companions as 'bully Bottom' and 'bully Titania' — terms of camaraderie and warmth, not intimidation. By the time of Dickens, three centuries later, the word had completed its reversal: the bully at Dickens's schools was a tormentor, a petty tyrant who exercised cruelty over those weaker than himself. The Victorian boarding school became the word's defining context, and the bully became a stock character in English literature — the older boy who terrorized the younger, the strong who preyed upon the weak.

The twenty-first century has expanded bully into a verb (to bully), a gerund (bullying), and a social phenomenon (cyberbullying) that has become one of the central concerns of educational psychology and digital culture. Anti-bullying campaigns, workplace bullying legislation, and online harassment policies all deploy the word with a moral seriousness that would have baffled its sixteenth-century users. The lover has become the tormentor. The darling has become the villain. And the old positive meaning survives only in historical curiosities — Roosevelt's bully pulpit, the occasional 'bully for you' — fossils of an era when the word named someone you wanted to be near rather than someone you needed protection from.