blatant
1596, in blatant beast, coined by Edmund Spenser in "The Faerie Queen" to describe a thousand-tongued monster representing slander, probably from L. blatire "to babble." It entered general use 1656, as "noisy in an offensive and vulgar way;" the sense of "obvious, glaringly conspicuous" is from 1889.
The origin of this adjective surprised me. And I thought, in my own armchair psychologist kind of way, that it was interesting that the meaning would have shifted by the time of the Victorian era, to cover anything that is "glaringly conspicuous" -- for, in a time and place when inconspicuousness was mandated by extreme moral compunction, it must have been truly offensive and vulgar, to be so glaringly conspicuous.
-Tim
