A useful way to hold devilish is to start with the ending. In English, -ish says a touch of, not the real thing. So devilish is not the devil itself; it is a trace of the devil left on something. Left on a face or a , it is horns and a red mask. Left on a plan, it is cruelty and cunning, and left on a hard task it is difficulty that feels deliberate. Left on a smile, it becomes the promise of small trouble, the kind that ends in laughing. And when people want any word to sound bigger, they reach for the devil too, so devilish can end up meaning nothing more than very.
From the word’s history
Wiktionary records devilish as Middle English develissh, that is devil plus the ending -ish, and lists the same build in Dutch duivels and German teuflisch. For the modern word the ending is the part that matters: it marks a resemblance rather than an identity.
Wiktionary 記載 devilish 來自中古英文 develissh，也就是 devil 加上 -ish，並列出荷蘭文 duivels、德文 teuflisch 是同樣的造法。對今天的用法來說，關鍵在 -ish：它標的是「像」，不是「是」。
packet evidence: Wiktionary etymology_text for devilish (source_ref kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:601954110:39107)
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