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Richard Nordquist is a freelance writer
and former professor of English and Rhetoric who wrote college-level Grammar
and Composition textbooks.
Updated December 04, 2017
Intensifiers and qualifiers really aren't bad words, not at all. Indeed, because they're
so brutally overworked, you might actually say they deserve our sympathy.
Why, there's
one now: actually. Ernest Gowers once dismissed this
"noise" as a "meaningless word" (A Dictionary of Modern
English Usage). Actually the word itself isn't meaningless, but when used
habitually as verbal filler it rarely adds much to the
meaning of a sentence.
Here are a few
more awesome words that truly deserve a rest.
Absolutely
It's a fact:
the word absolutely has replaced yes as the most common way of
expressing affirmation in English. And not just in American English. A few years back, in a
column written for The Guardian newspaper in England, Zoe Williams
encouraged a ban on the reiterated absolutely:
[P]eople use it to signify agreement. I'll be more
precise: when they are agreeing with their friends, they just go
"yeah." But when they are playing a game, be it on the telly, the
radio, or simply an arguing-game around a domestic table, they suddenly start
saying "absolutely." This is fine on the face of it, but I've
listened to Radio 4 a lot now, and realized that this usage
entails an obligatory repetition. They never just go "absolutely,"
the buffers. They go "absolutely, absolutely, absolutely,
absolutely." No word needs saying four times in a row. Not even a swear word.
What's hard to
understand is why the simple and emphatic yes has been supplanted by
this multisyllabic adverb.
Basically
Though not
nearly as annoying as the ubiquitous expressions "just sayin'" and
"bottom line," basically is basically an empty qualifier. In The
English Language: A User's Guide, Jack Lynch calls it "the written
equivalent of 'Um.'"
Awesome
Not long ago,
Canadian humorist Arthur Black wrote an awesome column on the devaluation of an
adjective that used to refer to something
that inspired awe—the aurora borealis, for instance, or the
eruption of Mount Vesuvius, or the Supreme Being.
A grand word, awesome, and it has served us well.
But somewhere along the way the word mutated, morphed and bloated into semantic meaninglessness.
This morning in a coffee shop I said “I’ll have a medium coffee, black,
please.” “Awesome,” the barista said.
No. No, that’s not awesome. As cups of coffee go, it turned out to be not half
bad, but "okay" is several light years from "awesome."
Over the past little while I’ve been informed by, or overheard people affirming
that: they’ve purchased an awesome T-shirt, watched an awesome commercial;
eaten an awesome hamburger; and met an awesome real estate agent. I’d like to
believe that all these experiences were as jaw-droppingly life-altering as the
adjective "awesome" implies. But somehow I doubt it.
("Dropping the A-word." The NEWS, June 24, 2014. Rpt. in Paint
the Town Black by Arthur Black. Harbour Publishing, 2015)
Linguists tell us that over the past few
decades the word awesome has experienced something called semantic shift. But that doesn't mean we
have to like it.
Very
This one has
been inflating student essays for a very long time. Bryan Garner, author
of Garner's Modern American Usage (2009), categorizes very as a weasel
word:
This intensifier, which functions as both an adjective
and an adverb, surfaces repeatedly in flabby writing. In almost every context
in which it appears, its omission would result in at most a negligible loss.
And in many contexts the idea would be more powerfully expressed without it.
Obviously. And
I mean totally.
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