How can fulsome constitute "a case of ironic understatement"?
Pretend that you're Devil's Advocate. 1. How can you possibly contend that fulsome is "a case of ironic understatement"?
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What's ironic?
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What's fulsome understating?
"fulsome" feels redundant for 2 reasons.
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If something's FULL (e.g. a cup of water), then it's physically impossible to add anything (let alone -SOM "to a considerable degree" — or something) to it.
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Fullness implies the notion of "to a considerable degree". If you own a full tank of petrol, then you have petrol to a considerate degree!
fulsome (adj.)
mid-13c., "abundant, plentiful," Middle English compound of ful "full" (see full (adj.)) + -som "to a considerable degree" (see -some (1)). Perhaps a case of ironic understatement. Sense extended to "plump, well-fed" (mid-14c.), then "arousing disgust" (similar to the feeling of having over-eaten), late 14c. Via the sense of "causing nausea" it came to be used of language, "offensive to taste or good manners" (early 15c.); especially "excessively flattering" (1660s). Since the 1960s, however, it commonly has been used in its original, favorable sense, especially in fulsome praise.
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The quoted definition appears to answer your question already.
An 300 ml cup of water is full if and only if it contains exactly 300 ml water. There's no mystery there, if you think of a cup the irony makes no sense because a cup is rigid. The same applies to a tank of petrol, which is normally made from rigid metal.
However, a balloon is flexible and has no one "max volume". You can fill a balloon with fluid or air in the sense that when you hold the balloon, the level of fluid comes up to its brim. It is now "full", and yet you can add additional fluid - it will stretch the balloon, so you will have to apply force to hold it in. But it will still be full, yet with a different volume.
"Full" is not well-defined for flexible containers. It is rather a spectrum. At the end of the spectrum you pump the balloon too much and it tears. If the balloon is actually your stomach, stretching can also be uncomfortable, painful, or lead to vomiting.
The ironic understatement here is exploiting this conceptual difference between full for a rigid object vs. flexible. When you say something is full, people tend to think of a rigid object, because those are simpler and conceptually parsimonious, more common in daily life, and the term "full" is more meaningful for them. But when you use it indirectly for a stomach, it takes some thought to realize that in fact, the container in question is flexible, and it's left unspecified how full it is (ie. whether it's just barely full or very overfull to the point of discomfort). Further thought reveals that had it been just barely full, it would not be worth mention, and had it been overfull, the speaker would have found it inappropriate to say so in polite company. Thus you realize to say "you're full" is actually a complex euphemism for "ugh, I overate, I'm gonna barf".
This is unexpected, and for a certain class of person, a fun discovery. Thus humor is often generated through discovery of a hidden meaning, or surprise. Hence, it is used as ironic understatement - "merely full" as opposed to "stuffed to the point of bursting", and even the possibility of bursting in the first place is understated (as in, it's not stated at all).
Feel free to leave your cheeky comment now with the Mark Twain quote about the frog :)
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Any understatement could be unintentional, or it could be motivated by pragmatic reasons such as hesitation to bring up a controversial point.
However, more often than not, blatant or ridiculously formed understatements are used ironically; and the irony very often concerns the understated quantity itself, indicating an absurdly high degree of that quantity.
"Fulsome" (originally spelt "fulsom") might count as ridiculously formed[1]. As you observed in your point #4, "full" expresses the absolute fullness, while the suffix "-some" indicates a degree, contradicting the fullness. The absurdly high degree of that quantity could then be "over-full", "over-satiated", with negative connotations. That meaning is given as one of the possible/historical meanings in your reference - which would mean that the irony would be getting conventionalized and lexicalized over a part of the word's history. The hypothesized irony could thus explain the negative connotations behind the sense "over-satiated".
However, perhaps we don't need to invoke irony to explain why "fulsome" sometimes acquires positive connotations and other times negative connotations. This lexicographer's lament offers an alternate possibility that "fulsome" would tend to have positive connotations when associated with "full", and negative connotations when associated with "foul"[2]. We all learned to treat "fulsome" as a single word with several meanings, but its etymology could involve an uneasy merger of two homonyms.
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Personally, I don't find anything ridiculous about the modern expression "rather full", and I'm not convinced that mid-13th century "fulsom" should be perceived as ridiculously formed at all. ↩︎
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In Scottish English, the spellings are (optionally) kept separate. ↩︎
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