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Wednesday, 21 March 2012

Living on the edge

Slang sees a particularly high turnover in intensifiers (words that do the same thing as very). For example, if you want to say that something is very good, you can choose between: mega good (since 1968)totally good (1972) well good (since at least 1986)or bare goodra gooddead goodproper good, and total good. The ones without dates aren't yet listed in the OED and there are probably more that I've missed here, as well as the various swear-words that could slot in before good, like bloody (1676), fucking (1898), and so on. Really good isn't slang in itself, but it starts to sound like slang when it's used often enough, and particularly with heavy emphasis in a posh accent.

This isn't anything new: slang and colloquial intensifiers through the ages have included monstrous (1569, though it wasn't slang to start with), dreadfully (since at least 1616), plaguily (1711),  shockingly (1777), frightfully (1816), gallows (since at least 1823), jolly (1838, or possibly earlier), terribly (since at least 1842), awfully (1859), tremendously (since at least 1863), fearfully (since at least 1878), immensely (1885), perfectly (since about 1915) and bally (1939). It's really hard to pin down when these slangy intensifiers developed, because they usually shade imperceptibly out of a usage that's closer to the etymological meaning, so a lot of these dates are based on interpreting OED citations under a broader definition.

A lot of the earlier intensifiers suggest that there's something frightening or dangerous about anything that's extreme (monstrous, dreadfully, plaguily, dead, and so on). Some later intensifiers suggest largeness of size or completeness of degree without originally implying a value judgement (immensely, perfectly, total(ly)), but the positive intensifiers are relatively modern (jolly, well, proper), and imply that extremeness is a good thing. We're living on the edge, my friend, keeping that envelope well and truly pushed.

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