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OP
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The other day on CBC I heard a woman being referred to as devastatingly beautiful. It made me think of other cases where adjectives with negative meanings in common usage are used as emphatic compliments.
It was awfully good. He was terribly talented.
Three questions:
1. Can anyone think of other examples (I had another one but lost it on the commute to work.)
2. I have only heard this usage from British or British-educated people, never from Americans. Is this just a Commonwealth thing?
3. Any theories as to why these words, which over the centuries have lost their original positive connotations, have yet retained them in this construction?
I remembered the other one: Wickedly. He's wickedly funny.
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old hand
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old hand
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In order
(1) You are positively wrong!
(2) Sounds awfully British to me.
(3) Inept wordsmiths trying to sound like ept wordsmiths
My own Q:
(a) Are these not adverbs, rather than adjectives?
(b) Why not drop all words with 'ly' suffixes on the basis that they are superfluous? (Yes that old hobby horse of mine again - sorry!!)
stales
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"Awesome" irritates me "terribly, awfully...."
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(a) Are these not adverbs, rather than adjectives?
Yes, they are adverbs. I'm awfully sorry and terribly embarrassed. I solemnly resolve not to post until after my first cup of tea in the morning.
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Terrible from terror
Awful from awe
?
Terrible trying to figure out awefull English, ain't it?
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the high priestess intones Awful from aweshe sits upon "the awless throne". -WS 
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this url is about 4 minutes in lenght.. it is .. http://www.gambino.com/tribute/tribute.swf -- almost beyond words.. and i don't even have a sound board (at work) so i didn't get the music.
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old hand
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old hand
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'member reading in a James Bond story years ago the phrase "exquisite agony" (whilst our hero was being totured). Always wondered about that one.
stales
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old hand
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'member reading in a James Bond story years ago the phrase "exquisite agony" (whilst our hero was being tortured). Always wondered about that one.
stales
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Carpal Tunnel
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Helen...that was...incredible. Thank you. Tears.
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addict
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wickedly funny.
To me the phrase means funny with a wicked sense of humour, that is slightly cruel. It predates the modern sense of wicked, I think.
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addict
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On the theme of words used to convey the opposite meaning, I was made aware of another meaning of Garble recently. Up until then, I had known the word Garble to mean distort or mix-up, as in "the loudspeaker garbled the message so much, it was hard to make out the meaning". However (and both offline dictionaries I have consulted gave it as the first but obsolete meaning), it also means to sift or to sort the good from the bad, particularly with spices. So to extract the meaning from a garbled message, one garbles it!
Does any one on the board still use this older meaning and if so, in what context? And any other examples?
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with garble, as a verb, you can easily see the (enantiodromic) change taking place in its senses, to wit:
†1. trans. To remove the garble or refuse from (spice, etc.); to sift, cleanse (const. of); also, to sift out. Obs.
2. To select or sort out the best in (any thing or set of things); to take the pick of. Now rare exc. in to garble the coinage. Also with out.
†b. esp. To ‘sift’ or ‘weed’ (an army, corporation, etc.) so as to exclude unfit or uncompliant members. Also to garble out: to remove (objectionable persons) after selection. Obs.
3. To make selections from with a (usually unfair or mischievous) purpose; to mutilate (a statement, writing, etc.) with a view to misrepresentation.
¶4. Confused with garbage v. = garbage v. 1.
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tsuwm tsays the high priestess intones Awful from awe
she sits upon "the awless throne". -WSOuch. I'll bet that smarts! Or did you mean "the owless throne"?
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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The use of "inapposite adverbs" as my English teacher - an English Literature PhD from Oxford and terribly erudite - used to call them was originally used to add the ultimate emphasis to the adjective with which they are associated. "Awfully good" beats out "the goodest", I guess! Okay, now shred my idol, prove he had feet of clay. See if I care! 
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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stranger
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I'm sure the list of these types of words can get to be pretty ugly.
Yes, us yanks do it too...
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Welcome aBoard, Giznawz. Er--you certainly have an interesting name! If you'd care to explain its origin, I'm all ears--but 'tisn't necessary. My first (and only) guess was that it was representing some British accent for "give us news", but then I realized you apparently are a "yank".
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I always thought it was strange that people say "Way to go" when congratulating others.
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us yanks do it too
And some of USns are awfully good at it. Others are awfully sorry that they do it but I say they're just victims of prescriptivist propaganda.
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I try to avoid clichés, but often find it difficult. Intensifiers are needed, but the repertoire is much too small.
Clumsy substitutes may be worse than the cliché.
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Is a "clumsy substitute" one who's brought on after a player is injured and then proceeds to fumble the ball in front of his/her own goal line in the face of a ravening, slavering pack of opposition players?
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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How about "plum" meaning totally? how did that come about? as in (adopts grizzled cowboy drawl) " that boy is plum crazy"
you Americans , such bad-asses!
Merry Christmas from a very wet very windy Blackpool (more glenfiddich needed back in a mo' )
the Duncster
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Dear Dunster,
Now I'm puzzled (nothin' new here). I always thought it was "plumb crazy," which makes sense to me if I think of a plumb line--you know, dropping straight down to the center of gravity with no interruption. tsuwm'll be riding in on his great horse called Lexicon any minute now--I'm can hear him galloping, galloping, galloping....
Plumb Fine Regards,
DubDub
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i think i am with wordwind on plumb (as in lead, the metal) a person who is plumb crazy is so crazy you can't plumb the depth...
plumb, from plumbum, the latin for lead, also gives us plumber..though, now days, not even waste pipes are made with lead.. a plumb, or sometime a plumb bob, a small lead weight, used to measure the depth of lake, or to drop a perfect vertical line.
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>i think i am with wordwind on plumb.. crazy...
you guys is plumbful of good notions. the word plumb (often spelt plum), while originally meaning vertical, perpendicular or straight down (rarely straight up), through transferral (hi bill!) has come to mean exactly, directly or precisely (and in US slang becomes an intensive: completely, entirely, absolutely, quite).
[and speaking of plumb lines, contrast them with rhumb lines -- or loxodromic curves.]
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Wow, tsuwm--cool!
The early navigators soon gave up great circle navigation ("orthodromie" en français) as a bad joke when they realised that, when sailing along agreat circle, the bearing changes constantly. They soon decided that sailing along a constant bearing, whilst perhaps taking a little longer, was far simpler. You just measured the bearing on the Mercator's chart, and this was the bearing to follow to go where you wanted to go.
This line of constant bearing is called a Rhumb line. The word "rhumb" (or sometimes rumb and it is the same in French though not very well known) comes from the name of angle measurement representing the "point" on the old fashioned compass cards. There are 32 "rhumbs" in 360 degrees, hence a rhumb is 11 1/4 degrees. From: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~jjjacq/sundry/navrhumb.htmlI didn't look long enough to find a good explanation of loxodromic curves, but take a gander at this title in a list of articles I found: On unsmoothable diffeomorphisms. Bulletin of the American Math Society, vol. 81, p. 746, 1975. tsuwm, do you have an interest in maps, or is this just yet another evidencing of your vast storehouse of knowledge?
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How about "plum" meaning totally?So then plum pudding is totally pudding? Pure, true, 100%, pudding pudding!? Plumb the depths of that one, will ya? 
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tsuwm, do you have an interest in maps, or is this just yet another evidencing of your vast storehouse of knowledge?tsuwm is our board's Little Jack Horner, who sat in a corner: every time he sticks in his thumb, he pulls out a plum for us. Thank you, tsuwm!
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I'm afraid that part of the answer to this is that it merely comes from *attempting* (and I emphasize the word) to read writers such as Eco and Pynchon, who write from these seemingly unfathomable depths. for an instance, I wandered onto the word loxodrome reading Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (but, of course, you have to also wonder enough to LIU in order to discover rhumb lines and loxodromic curves.)
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