Confusing words - near, nearby, close, next

Students sometimes get confused when to use near or nearby, near (to) or close to, and nearest or next. Master the differences with these three exercises.

Some random thoughts about hurt people and dictionaries

We can often use participles (usually ending in -ed or -ing) as adjectives. A present participle (-ing form) usually has an active meaning and a past participle (3rd form) usually has a passive meaning:

• The winning team was cheered loudly by its supporters.
  = the team which won - active meaning
• The players of the defeated team looked exhausted.
  = the team that was defeated - passive meaning

In this post, I'm interested in one particular pair of adjectives made from past participles (PPs): injured and hurt.

Adjective order plus - various exercises

These exercises will give you some practice in adjective order, and also in word order in general. This post is part of an experiment to develop more tablet-friendly exercises.

Gradable or ungradable? List of adjectives

Gradable Adjectives

Some people find this site by googling "Is xyz gradable?". Some others are looking for lists of gradable and ungradable adjectives. So I thought I'd try and make a table. This is not meant to be a complete list, but as people ask about other adjectives I'll try and add them to the list.

Negative prefixes with adjectives - quiz

We often use prefixes to give adjectives a negative meaning:

• un-  The most common, can appear before any letter
• in-   The next most common, appears mainly before the letters a,c,d,e,f,h,o,s,v
• il-     Appears before some, but not all, adjectives beginning with l
• im-  Appears before some, but not all, adjectives beginning with m, p
• ir-    Appears before some, but not all, adjectives beginning with r
• dis- Appears before certain adjectives

Unfortunately there are no exact rules as to when each one is used, you just have to learn which one is used with each adjective. This exercise should help you.

Vocab game - Extreme adjective quiz

This is a bit of an experiment to try out a new program. If you were simply looking for a list of of gradable and ungradable adjectives, you can find one here.

The quiz has forty pairs of gradable and extreme adjectives, divided into four sets of ten pairs each. You can do them in the order given or they can be randomised.

Gradable and ungradable adjectives

Why should we be interested in whether adjectives are gradable or not?

There are two main reasons why knowing a bit about the gradabilty of adjectives is useful to students.

• 1. - it largely decides what intensifiers, adverbs like quite, very and absolutely, we can use before them.
• 2. - learning some strong versions of gradable adjectives will increase your vocabulary, and make your English more varied and interesting.

For this reason, I will only be looking here at those adjectives that we often use intensifiers with. There are a lot of ungradable adjectives like metal, married or pregnant, where we don't normally use intensifiers. I won't be discussing these here.

As usual in my lessons, I won't be telling you much, you will need to work it out for yourselves through the exercises. If you simply want an explanation, there are some links below.

Looking for a list of gradable and ungradable adjectives?

If you've landed here because you're trying to find out whether a particular adjective is gradable or not, you might not find the answer here, but you could try my newer post where I list a lot adjectives as being gradable, extreme or absolute. You can find it here.

A British perspective on further or farther

The question of further vs farther is a popular topic on grammar websites and has been discussed often enough on sites like GrammarGirl, so why should it need anything more said about it?

Because firstly, nearly all these websites are American, and the British 'take' on this question is somewhat different. And secondly, they nearly all put forward a so-called 'rule' which is by no means universally accepted.

Adjectives after the verb to be, followed by infinitives

There are a number of adjectives that can be followed by an infinitive when they come after the verb to be. Here are some exercises to practise the following patterns:

1. Subject + be + adjective + to-infinitive
2. Subject + be + adjective + to-infinitive to talk about the future.
3. It is + adjective + to-infinitive
4. It is + adjective + for / of + object + to-infinitive

Random quiz - Dependent prepositions after adjectives

This quiz is based on a list of around 100 adjectives with their dependent prepositions.

Verbs ending in -en based on adjectives

There are a small number of verbs made from adjectives (or occasionally nouns based on adjectives) with -en added, meaning to make something more of that quality the adjective describes.

These verbs fall into certain categories:

• Dimensions and shape - lengthen, shorten, straighten etc
• Light and colour - brighten, darken, whiten etc
• Density and composition - harden, soften, thicken etc
• Others - freshen, ripen, sweeten etc

These are ergative verbs, which means they can be transitive or intransitive, and where the object of the transitive verb becomes the subject of the intransitive verb.

• The hot summer ripened the fruit earlier than usual.
• The fruit ripened in the sun.

For more on ergative verbs see my post - Ergative verbs? What on earth are they?

Here are three short exercises based on -en verbs

Word corner - fair

The word fair can be an adjective, an adverb and a noun, and has various different meanings, as well as being the basis of several idioms. Here are a couple of exercises to help you suss it out.

Remember not to confuse fair with the noun and verb fare. There are some dictionary links below.

Lesson on intensifiers

I've noticed that a few people who have googled "intensifiers" have landed up on a post I wrote some time ago about "ridiculously". And I imagine they've felt rather disappointed, as it didn't say much about other intensifiers, just defended the use of ridiculously.

So here, to make amends, is the real McCoy, a lesson on intensifiers.

• The basics - gradable and non-gradable adjectives
• Collocations - adverbs with adjectives
• Collocations - adverbs with verbs
• Collocations - adjectives with nouns
• Intensifying with so and such
• Intensifying with well

Awesome revisited

It seems I'm not the only one to regret the passing of the sense of sheer wonder that the word awesome used to have before it became 'the contemporary superlative of choice'. Jemima Kiss at the Guardian (whose quote that is) apparently has a similar feeling of loss.

She, like me, evokes the Grand Canyon as being something truly worthy of the description, and also sees the technological industry as the main culprits in its overuse.

And also like me, she wonders what word people will have available when they see something which truly is awesome.

See:

• My original post - Nowadays awesome is not quite as awesome as it used to be.
• The Guardian - SXSW 2011: A crash guide to 'awesome', by Jemima Kiss

Intensifiers are ridiculously easy to understand

This post is mainly a discussion of one intensifier - ridiculously. For a more general lesson on intensifiers, please see my new post here

The Grammarphobia Blog recently published a post where a reader complained about the use of the adverb ridiculously as a substitute for tremendously and gave this example sentence:

She’s ridiculously chic

And the writer of the blog more or less agreed with him, saying:

What you’re seeing or hearing here is the use of “ridiculously” as an intensifier meaning very, extremely, extraordinarily, and (as you point out) tremendously.

And they found what they claim is an early example of this usage, by the writer Monica Enid Dickens:

The gravel drive, where even a tired horse used to jog-trot because his stable was near, was ridiculously short.

(A drive is a small private road which connects a private house to the public road. Gravel is the very small stones sometimes used to make these roads. Jog-trot is a way a horse moves. What she's saying is that the drive was so short that even if the horse was tired it started going faster because it knew it was nearly home.)

But does ridiculously simply mean very, or perhaps very, very? Was Dickens being careless in her choice of words? Is it that ridiculously simple? I think not.