on your choice of adverbial intensifiers and what it says about you

I've been mulling over writing about spiritual abuse, but it's such a heavy topic.  It's like Hotel Rwanda or Dr. Zhivago -- I want to have seen these movies, but I'm never in the mood to actually watch them because they seem so heavy.  (I'm hoping for Grand Budapest Hotel tonight if my friends and I can find a theater that shows it with Italian subtitles rather than Italian dubbing.)

So instead I'm going to write about something EVERYONE will find fun -- adverbial intensifiers!   Yaaaaaay!!!  (Ok, I know I've already lost most of you.  Actually, I guess most of my readership -- all 5 of you -- didn't even check in, based on the title.)  

The reason I've been thinking about this so much is because I'm still going through social withdrawal symptoms from my trip to Bulgaria, where I got to spend time with my friend Samantha who I noticed primarily uses the rather uncommon adverbial intensifier "super" in conversation to modify descriptive adjectives (though I noticed that she almost never uses it in writing -- email or Facebook chat).    

For example:  

                              "This sandwich is super tasty."

I think the standard intensifier in spoken American English, at least the varieties with which I'm familiar, is "really."  Out of curiosity I went to a recent lengthy Facebook chat and looked at all the occurrences of "really."  Let's just say it was really, really numerous.

So if someone said, 

                              "This sandwich is really tasty."

You wouldn't even really notice it.  (There it is again -- I said really.)  

But "super" is a little out of the ordinary.  "Super" fits Sam -- and if you know her, you know what I mean.  She's a really fun person.  It's like an extra fun burst of energy in her language, making the sandwich not just really tasty, but super tasty.  Just a little tastier than really tasty.  Yet it's not wordy or pretentious at all.   

My college friend Chris uses "ridiculously."  I think this is an awesome intensifier, highlighting what an awesome person she is.  Unfortunately I'm not sure if she still uses it as ridiculously often as she used to, because I've pointed it out a little too often.  Observer's paradox (or rather, Intrusively Commenting Observer's paradox).

                              "This sandwich is ridiculously tasty."  

(By the way, I should mention that I found the below image on the internet by Googling "ridiculously tasty sandwich" and taking the top hit.  It's a Molten Brie sandwich, and it does look like something I'd club baby seals to get a chance to eat.)

One must have a really great way of looking at the world to find things ridiculously tasty, or ridiculously entertaining, or even ridiculously bad.  It's like being constantly shocked and amused at how extreme things can be --  retaining a great sense of wonder about the world and keeping things lively.  As in, I am so amazed at how tasty this sandwich is, it makes me stare at it in wonder and then throw back my head laughing at the improbability of my good luck that I came across it.  "Ridiculously" also makes you sound smart.  Chris always sounds ridiculously smart.  I borrow this intensifier very occasionally -- I think the last time I used it in Facebook chat with Sam was the following sentence:

                              "Now that's some ridiculously good love advice."  

This was regarding advice I was giving Sam about dressing up her daughter in super geeky clothes to keep the boys away once she's a teen.  Yes, I was complimenting my own advice.  It was ridiculously good love advice, in contrast to the ridiculously awful love advice that the stone troll "love experts" give in Frozen.  If you knew how adorable Asha is, you'd agree about my amazing wisdom.  Kids of all ages and genders, including her own little brother, are already fighting over who gets to sit next to her at parties. Imagine what will happen when puberty kicks in?  So it's either the geeky clothes or Trevor needs to get a shotgun -- and if you know Trevor's temperament -- he's like the nicest guy I've ever met -- you'd go for the bad clothes. 

There's also the very amusing meme of the ridiculously photogenic guy, girl, prison inmate, dog, etc.  My favorite is the ridiculously photogenic horse.  He looks like an equine Fabio.

Now, let's take the word "very."  It mostly seems to belong in written English.  But when you say it out loud, you either sound like a non-native English speaker, or like you're talking to a non-native English speaker or to small children -- or you just sound kind of snooty.  For instance:

                              "This sandwich is very tasty." 

Say it out loud.  Heck, say out loud any sentence with the word "very" in it and see if you don't sound either overly pedantic or extremely naive about the world.  

The one exception is when you add a fake foreign accent.  Then I think it's quite amusing.  I usually go for vampire dialect, i.e. fake Transylvanian:  as in "Ve-ry in-te-res-ting…" but occasionally do a bad Korean one "be-ry be-ry in-te-res-ting" (which I'm allowed to do because I'm Korean.  Sorry nonAsians, you're not allowed.  It's the "my momma" rule -- I can make fun of my momma because she's my momma, but you can't make fun of my momma.  I guess I'm breaking the "my momma" rule with my fake Transylvanian accent.  Sorry, vampires.)

When I teach ESL, "very" is one of the first things I get people to change to sound more authentically American (if they're going for an American speech pattern) -- to switch to "really."

I think my own personal intensifier of choice is "crazy."  As in: 

                              "This sandwich is crazy good."  

It's probably because it's a good reflection of me.  Yep.  When I say it, it's often more like:

                              "This sandwich is craaaaazy good."  

I spent an afternoon with Sam's children laughing hysterically about how crazy happy the monkey in their random Ni Hao Kai Lan book looked about everything.  He looked insanely, unjustifiably happy on almost every page of the book.  The animals found a new path?  I am crazy happy about that!  We bumped into a random elephant?  I am insanely over the moon with joy!

Here's a good picture showing the kind of wacko bafflingly unjustified happiness I'm talking about.  Looks like the tiger ate the same brownies as the monkey in this particular illustration.

We found it craaaaazy funny.

[THE FOLLOWING IS THE POINT OF THE WHOLE BLOG POST, EMBEDDED STRANGELY IN THE MIDDLE.]

The reason why I find this whole topic interesting is because of a principle of language which I believe wholeheartedly -- it also happens to be my main principle for understanding poetry:  "It's not just what you say that's important, it's how you say it."  While of course I believe content is ultimately more important than form, what makes people good communicators is if they can transmit the energy they feel to other people though the way they communicate.  Both Sam and Chris are good communicators.  If they are enjoying that sandwich, you better believe that they're going to get you to see how good that sandwich is and envy them their sandwich experience.  But if a lesser communicator is eating a sandwich and just tells me,

                              "This sandwich is really tasty."

I'm not sure if I'm really going to care that much or want to snatch their sandwich away and bury my face in it.

(If you want to dispute my belief that form matters in communication, I wrote a paper in college on Logos, the Word of God, exploring the connection between form and function, and how it was not only what God said, but how He said it that was important.  Since the ultimate form of the Word of God was Jesus sent to earth, God Incarnate Himself was the truest expression of God's Word.  Thus form matters.  Booya!  I just pulled the Jesus card on you.  Can't argue with me any more.)

So I organized other intensifiers I could think of into a spectrum of intensity -- the further down the list, the more intense/lively/fun the intensifier.  

SPECTRUM OF INTENSITY

pretty

so
very

really

extremely

totally

seriously

super

amazingly

crazy

ridiculously

Of course, there's a bunch that I haven't mentioned because they're just not as common, e.g. wonderfully, horribly, terribly, remarkably, etc.  And another whole category I've excluded -- the ones that are considered more like swear words -- because I just couldn't figure out where they are on the spectrum, since it depends on the speaker.  Here are the edgier intensifiers I could think of (which don't seem to go with "tasty" very well -- maybe because when you're in a mode where only profanity will suffice, you really don't need more elaborate descriptors than "good"):

                              "This sandwich is hella good."

                              "This sandwich is soooo freakin' good."

                              "This sandwich is *beep*ing good!"

(Ok, yeah, I'm lame.  I'm such a goody two shoes, I can't even write *beep* in my blog without beeping myself out.  Then again, it's also efficient, since there are various swear words that could fill in the blank there.)

So if I said it, *beep*ing would be probably be way more extreme than "ridiculously," but some people use it so carelessly it probably ranks around the same as "really."  I think if you have to swear, wait until it's really justifiable, i.e. you're really really angry.  Otherwise you lose the sting of using profanity, and nobody will pay attention when you do use it.  I really wouldn't waste it on a sandwich.

I must also mention a few other intensifiers used more commonly in some nonAmerican varieties of English -- British, Australian, Kiwi, etc.  Recently I've been reading a book (recommended to me by my previously mentioned super fun friend) called Watching the English, by Kate Fox, an English anthropologist explaining English culture, so I've got Brits on the brain.  Of course I know very little of these cultures, so forgive me for the gross generalizations / conclusions drawn based on what I've seen of these cultures from bumping into other travelers in mostly Latin countries, and this one book that I haven't finished reading yet.  Yep, great data collection. 

rather
quite

awfully

dreadfully

bloody 

I do somehow fall into using "quite" a lot when I'm around people who say it.  It seems to be their "really" -- the most common intensifier in daily speech.  Fox's analysis of British conversation gives a lot of insight into "quite."  She has a principle of English conversation which she calls The Importance of Not Being Earnest.

"At the most basic level, an underlying rule in all English conversation is the proscription of 'earnestness'.  Although we may not have a monopoly on humor, or even on irony, the English are probably more acutely sensitive than any other nation to the distinction between 'serious' and 'solemn,' between 'sincerity' and 'earnestness'.  

I realized from Fox's writing that I would probably not do well in England, just as I would not do well among the Japanese, Thai, or Javanese -- socially polite and restrained cultures.  I am the most earnest person I know.  I like passionate, in-your-face cultures.  I get along with Latinos and Afghans and the Sundanese.  Luckily, being born Asian has tempered me a bit -- I do have some complicating indirectness and shyness going on at the same time.  I think the only things I can really share with the English are whatever social rules are shared with Asians, and their self-deprecating humor, which I enjoy.  

Specifically, I would not do well with the part of The Importance of Not Being Earnest principle that Fox calls The Understatement Rule -- the "almost constant use of understatement," which prohibits "any hint of forbidden solemnity, unseemly emotion or excessive zeal."  Unseemly emotion and excessive zeal is my middle name.  Here's an amusing example from Fox's book:

My father tells me about some desperately anglophile Italian friends of his, who were determined to be as English as possible…But they complained that they couldn't quite 'do' the English understatement, and pressed him for instructions.  On one occasion, one of them was describing, heatedly and at some length, a ghastly meal he had had at a local restaurant -- the food was inedible, the place was disgustingly filthy, the service rude beyond belief, etc., etc.  'Oh,' said my father at the end of the tirade, 'So you wouldn't recommend it, then?' 'YOU SEE?' cried his Italian friend.  'That's it!  How do you do that?"  

Anyway, "quite" feels to me like an understatement, even as you're using an intensifier.  You want to say that something is more than normal, but you don't want to wave any flags about it.  I like "quite" because it's brief and to the point, but for me it's more like speaking a different language and taking on a different persona.  When I'm around Brits, Ozzies, and Kiwis, I catch myself unconsciously saying things like "Fancy a bite to eat later?" and "I'll ring you for tea" (by which I mean dinner) and being more simultaneously casual and polite than usual.  I'm not a total social chameleon -- I definitely still act like my confused Korean-American self around them -- but I just pick up their little verbal patterns.  Around them, I'll also use "quite" a lot with the word "nice" -- an adjective I'd almost never use in American English to describe anything other than a person, or a nice time I had.  But I feel like nonAmerican English speakers can use it for just about anything.  

                            "This sandwich is quite nice."  

Again, it feels like you're saying something positive about the sandwich but not really being that enthusiastic about it.  Classic English understatement.   

[EDIT:  After interviewing a Brit in my Italian class, I need to revise.  "Quite good" isn't actually an understatement of something really good.  It's a statement of something somewhat good, but not really that great.  Maybe on the level of a "pretty good."  My source tells me that for things he feels strongly about, he usually uses "really," just like the Americans.  He had to ponder whether he'd say "very" or "really."  After a bit of unsuccessful probing, the scenario that I eventually had to give him to extract a realistic response was telling him a really pretty girl just walked by and asking him what he'd say to his mate.  He immediately said, "She's really hot! …Oh, I guess I say 'really.'"]

I'm pretty fond of "bloody" as an adverbial intensifier, and have often wondered about its etymology with this usage, so I finally looked it up.  Popularly, it's thought of as being linked to Jesus's blood and thus blasphemous, but the OED denies this speculation:

The OED says the origin is uncertain, but possibly refers to "bloods" (aristocratic rowdies) of the late 17th-early 18th centuries ... "bloody drunk" arising from '"drunk as a blood" ... and the association with bloody battle, bloody butcher, etc., "appealed to the imagination of the rough classes." They add, "There is no ground for the notion that 'bloody', offensive as ... it is now to polite ears, contains any profane allusion or has connection with the oath ' 's blood!', referring to the blood of Jesus."

When I moved to Brazil and started hanging out with a lot of Kiwis, I picked it up and started using "bloody" a lot, even at school amongst my third graders -- until my Canadian colleague informed me that it's considered offensive and inappropriate for children.  Oops.  

                              "This sandwich is bloody good."

But doesn't that sound cool?  There I go, just being one of those Americans who gush earnestly over how great British English sounds -- to their disgust.   

Ok, which intensifiers did I miss?  What are your adverbial intensifiers of choice, and why?
  
My apologies if this was pretentious, or pedantic, or just ridiculously boring.  I think I bored myself a little with this post.  But I didn't have to think about spiritual abuse and such other heavy topics!   

But since I like to end blog posts with a video or a song, here's one that proves my point, that words are powerful and you should choose them wisely.

*EDIT*  
I changed the title of this post because the original "ridiculously long post on…" was probably chasing people away.  Also, I wanted to add this clip from How I Met Your Mother last season in which the Mother uses an interesting adverbial intensifier when she says "bonkers beautiful."