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 #2 (permalink) Sun Jan 27, 2008 13:50 pm the use of the word 'very' |
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| In theory, there's no reason why one can't say "very delicious", and many people commonly say it, although it might sound a little odd to other people. You can also say something is "quite delicious", which sounds a little better than "very delicious". I don't know why the person who wrote that test thought that "absolutely" was possible and "very" was not. If you do a Google search of the exact phrases, you get about 600,000 hits for "very delicious" and about 800,000 for "absolutely delicious". You can even find 12,000 pages that contain both phrases. Most of these appear to have been written by native English speakers, so the test you took poses a great mystery. |
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Jamie (K)
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Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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| #3 (permalink) Sun Jan 27, 2008 14:44 pm the use of the word 'very' |
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Hi, Jamie
There's a rule in one of my textbooks on English which states:
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We do not use very and extremely before adjectives which contain "very" as part of their meaning, e.g. delighted (very pleased), enormous (very big), exhausted (very tired), filthy (very dirty), soaked (very vet). If we wish to intensify these adjectives, we use absolutely and completely
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Do you find that's true? |
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Lost_Soul
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| #4 (permalink) Sun Jan 27, 2008 14:54 pm the use of the word 'very' |
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| lost_soul wrote: |
There's a rule in one of my textbooks on English which states:
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We do not use very and extremely before adjectives which contain "very" as part of their meaning, e.g. delighted (very pleased), enormous (very big), exhausted (very tired), filthy (very dirty), soaked (very vet). If we wish to intensify these adjectives, we use absolutely and completely
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Do you find that's true? |
I would just say it's more unusual to use "very" with these adjectives, but that it's sometimes done. If it's wrong to use "very" with them, it should also be wrong to use "quite" with them, because it amounts to the same thing. However, you could use "quite" with any of them.
If we were to say that something is "absolutely delicious" or "completely delicious", that pushes it to the extreme, where nothing can be more delicious. I had some pretzels yesterday that were quite delicious (some people would say very delicious), but they weren't absolutely delicious, because there are millions of things more delicious than pretzels. |
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Jamie (K)
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Joined: 24 Feb 2006
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Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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| #5 (permalink) Sun Jan 27, 2008 15:14 pm the use of the word 'very' |
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Hi Alex
I'd say that 'rule isn't bad as a guideline for usage tendency. It's not that you can never say something such as "very delicious", but "absolutely delicious" does sound like a more natural and usual choice to me.
However, your "rule" might work even better in the other direction -- i.e. I doubt I would describe someone/something as being absolutely pleased, absolutely big, absolutely tired, absolutely dirty, absolutely wet, absolutely cold, etc. 
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Yankee
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| reported speech (He said he was at school yesterday.) | Is that really an indirect speech? |
