It was a form of rhetorical exercise "in which the legitimate methods of the encomium are applied to persons or objects in themselves obviously unworthy of praise, as being trivial, ugly, useless, ridiculous, dangerous or vicious" — see Arthur S. Pease, "Things Without Honor", Classical Philology, Vol.
Pease surveys this field from its origins with the defence of Helen ascribed to Gorgias, and cites De Quincey's "On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts" and Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass as modern examples.
Pease suggests that the skill was taught in ancient Greece, where the matters known to have been praised included gout, blindness, deafness, old age, negligence, adultery, flies, gnats, bedbugs, smoke, and dung.
The first English treatise on the subject was Anthony Munday's "The defence of contraries" (1593), a translation of Charles Estienne's "Paradoxes, ce sont propos contre la commune opinion" and based on Ortensio Landi's "Paradossi".
Walter K. Olson, writing in the Leisure & Arts section of the September 8, 2005, edition of The Wall Street Journal, quotes the following passage from Sadakat Kadri, "The Trial: A History, from Socrates to O.J.