I see several definitions purporting that "insegrevious" was invented in the 1980s. Absolutely not true. Gary Owens used this regularly on his KMPC radio show in
Los Angeles, which I used to listen to avidly as a boy every weekday evening in the early 1960s. His sign-off was "Insegreviously yours, Gary Owens". By the
time I entered junior high
school in 1968 I had heard him use "insegrevious" so enough I had begun using it myself to kid around with my classmates. This predated Rowan and
Martin´s "Laugh In" (which started in 1968), on which Gary Owens played himself and again often used "insegrevious"), by several years. Regarding the idea that Adam West first used the word in a 1967 episode of "Batman" (which I also watched regularly as a boy), this hardly seems likely. The Gary Owens radio show was immensely popular in
LA, and I would bet my bottom dollar that West (or the Batman writers) picked it up from there.
Now, whether Gary Owens picked it up from somewhere else prior to his years at KMPC (starting in 1962), I wouldn´t know.
And of course it is merely a nonsense word, probably coined by Owens to poke
fun at
people who used
words they didn´t actually understand.
