The medical community sometimes tries to suggest that “addiction” should be limited to its clinical sense — that is, it’s not helpful to a discussion of physical addiction to, say, opiates, if it’s also common to say things like “I love chocolate; I’m really addicted,” or “I’m addicted to that new coffee shop.” As almost always happens, though, scolding about word usage either doesn’t work or actually makes things worse (in the scolds’ opinion, at least).
“Addict” doesn’t quite mean today what it used to mean. The word appeared in the 1500s, based on the Latin word “addictus,” which meant “assigned by decree.” If you look deeper, it’s based on “dictum,” to speak. In this passage from 1529 it means “devoted to:” “Be not parcyallye addicte to the one nor to the other.” The main thing about the early version of “addict” is that the devotion, binding, contractual obligation, or slavery isn’t just about a person, it’s to a person.
“Addict” was also a different part of speech back then; it was an adjective. You’d say “I am not addict to the Earl of Goosepip.” After which, of course, it was the Earl of Goosepip’s job to change that.
In some circles, Shakespeare gets credit for the word “addiction.” You can find it used in Henry V to mean something like “interest:” “his addiction was to courses vain.” That’s the Archbishop talking about King Henry before the King got interested in theology. But in this case Shakespeare wasn’t the first to use it, as you can see from this piece of 1532 text: “An ouermoche addiction to priuate appetites, mixed with to moche heedinesse and obstinacy.”
Use of “addict” as a noun to mean a person with an addiction didn’t start until nearly the 20th century. And even at the beginning, usage would have annoyed today’s scolds: “Indulgers in stimulating food, gluttonous feeders, tea and coffee addicts, are much more prone to beget degenerate and inebriate offspring…” You read that right; it’s a claim that if you drink tea your kids are going to get drunk.
The more casual sense of being an addict to something like a hobby first showed up a couple of decades later: “General Pershing..is not a ‘jazz’ addict, but a lover of real music.” Notice once again that you could take that as slightly derisive — the next step, of course, would be to say that if you listen to jazz your kids are also going to get drunk. There’s something about using the word “addict” that seems to be associated with being both judgmental and having a certain flexibility when it comes to logic.
Another word based on “dictum”, by the way, is “dictionary”. So I suppose if you use dictionaries too much, you could be described as “addicted to dictionaries”. Which on the one hand starts to sound a little redundant. But at least nobody (yet) claims it’s going to lead to your children getting drunk.
