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.

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

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.