GOURMAND

I'd probably buy any book with the word dunce in it even if it wasn't that good. This is one such book. It's an interesting dichotomy just the same as many words in the English language have not only changed their meaning through the years but some mean the exact opposite of what they were previously defined as. Gourmand isn't one of them but since it's unfamiliar to most I'll include it here:

GOURMAND

(person devoted to excessive eating and drinking)

The disparaging use of 'gourmand', almost meaning 'glutton', has existed in English since the fifteenth century. In the eighteenth century, however, the word acquired a more favourable sense, closer to 'gourmet' (although not under the influence of it since this latter word was not used in English until a century later). This usage can be seen, for example, in a fairly trivial poem of 1839 by Winthrop M. Praed:

You know that I was held by all 
The greatest epicure in Hall, 
And that the voice of Granta's sons 
Styled me the Gourmand of St. John's. 

Charlotte Brontë, too, used the word favourably, with an appropriately feminine ending, in Villette (1853): 'Fifine was a frank gourmande; any body could win her heart through her palate'. This meaning appears to have been ousted, or even replaced, by 'gourmet', however, when it caught on in the nineteenth century, and 'gourmand' today has only its undesirable sense.



from Dunces, Gourmands & Petticoats: 1,300 Words Whose Meanings Have Changed Through the Ages by Adrian Room