ADDICTED

The word “addicted” is now generally used of bad habits (“addicted to drugs and alcohol”). Shakespeare uses “addict” and its cognates similarly, always of trivial or less desirable habits.

“But, if't be he I mean, he's very wild;

Addicted so and so.”

—Hamlet (II, 1, 19)

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, “addic...