Last weekend, the Massachusetts Medievalist spent substantial amounts of time reading an eclectic but intensely satisfying trio: Tina Brown’s wonderfully snarky The Palace Papers, Ann Patchett’s quietly profound These Precious Days, and Jennifer Raff’s thoughtfully presented Origin: a genetic history of the Americas. I mentioned to the husband that all three were “pretty spectacular.” He thought I meant they were somewhat spectacular but I thought they were very spectacular.
Next thing I knew I was going down a grammatical rabbit hole to explore the use of pretty as an adverb. I suspect that adverbial pretty is in the middle of a semantic shift so please keep your ears open for this nuance!
The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that adverbial pretty means “to a considerable extent; fairly, moderately; rather, quite” with examples from the sixteenth century onwards (fave: W.S. Maugham’s 1932 “I’m pretty nimble on me feet”). Terttu Nevalainen and Matti Rissanen provide more depth and terminology as they discuss adverbial pretty as a “moderator,” meaning that it has “a slightly lowering effect” – so that a “pretty good dinner” is adequate and okay but not a fully, actually good dinner. Pretty scales downwards from the assumed norm of the modified element: a pretty good song is not as good as a good song.
But then the OED mentions that “in later use also: very.” So a pretty good painting could be an adequate painting but then it could also be a very good painting? We seem to be at a moment when one word can mean two almost-opposite things, just as literally can now mean both “literally” and “figuratively.”
But one nuance occurred to me, and here’s where I’d love some input in the comments section: I suspect that the “very” meaning of pretty adheres more to adjectives that are already intensely positive or negative: pretty spectacular, pretty amazing, pretty revolting, pretty terrible. Here, pretty intensifies a word that’s already pretty intense (did you see what I did there?). When pretty modifies a word that’s already more moderate in evaluation, it simply moderates it further: I had a pretty fun time at the reunion, the workshop was pretty useful, I read a pretty interesting book.
Does this theory make sense with the way you are using adverbial pretty these days? Let me know if I should go further down this rabbit hole…..
I would go down that rabbit hole if I were you! Before you jump, check this out:
Tagliamonte, S. A. (2008). So different and pretty cool! Recycling intensifiers in Canadian English. Special issue of English Language and Linguistics, Intensifiers, Guest editor Bélen Mendez-Naya 12(2): 361-394.