Wordplay: It is simply lamentable how much the meaning of deplorable has changed

Dr Dog has a full caseload. The poor mutt has to succour the Gumboyles, attending to the family's coughs, colds and aches. I'm hearing the story blow by blow as I try to write this week's column, dealing with a headstone in Penang.

Now and then, for different reasons, I work in my local library. My prime spot is the window that overlooks a harem of eucalypts, their leaves dancing as I type. Now Dr Dog is tending to Grandpa, the poor sod eating too many baked beans. "Dangerous gases are building up," recites the librarian to the kids at her feet.

Meanwhile that Penang headstone was downright garrulous compared with its modern counterpart – a full 77 words including roman numerals. Clearly a chiseller's rates were cheap in 1819, back when John Alexander Bannerman succumbed to cholera, aged LX.

Brian Bodger, a nomadic history buff, sent me the headstone pic last week, a souvenir of a recent Malaysian trip with wife, Chris. By all accounts Bannerman was a judicious governor of Penang, an office-bearer of the East India Company, "whom he faithfully served with unwearied zeal and spotless integrity".

Yet that phrase wasn't the sticking point. Rather the muddle arose in the epitaph's coda. See if you can spot the cause of Brian's bewilderment: "… universally respected and deeply deplored by an affectionate family". Punctuation aside, the mystery lay in that final verb – deplored?! And not just deplored, but deeply.

What on earth did this faithful servant do wrong? As Brian put it: "Has the meaning of the word changed diametrically since the 18th century or what?" Dr Dog, I should add, has been put to be bed, both mutt and book. Now Miss Trish is reading about an orphaned chicken. Adding to the hubbub, a year 9 class has colonised the so-called study carrels. Xerox machines churn overtime, fluoro lights flicker and my laptop battery just hit red. If not for the eucalypts I'd scream.

Brian is right of course. While not diametrically, deplore has shifted ground since Bannerman lay in his. Two centuries ago, deplore was the stuff of private lamentation, a lavender-scented hankie up the sleeve. Its root is plorare, the Latin for weep, or cry out. By the book, exploration translates as yelling into the unknown, as if a tentative cooee might be answered in the wild.

Since Bannerman's funeral, however, deplore has drifted from dignified to indignation, from wake to fully woke. Gaining a new alignment, lamenting has gone from a graveside sniffle to an online gutful, those dangerous gases ever building.

Nowadays rage has become the latest rage, with deplore its central doing word. Modern humans don't miss as much as hiss, where anger triggers lurk in every phone scroll, each bulletin and headline. Google the verb and you'll find deplore decrying clean coal, home invasions, Mark Latham, Gogglebox, mansplaining, Pepsi ads, chemical weapons. Thanks to Hillary Clinton's barb in 2016, supporters of Donald Trump are the basket of deplorables, the discreet boohoo of yesteryear usurped by the righteous tsk-tsk of today.