Definition:
An adverbial construction used to support a claim or express a viewpoint more assertively and convincingly. Contrast with verbal hedge. See also:
Etymology:
Perhaps from dialectal boostering, "bustling, active"Examples:
- "Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love."
(Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey) - "The history of England is emphatically the history of progress."
(Thomas Babington Macaulay) - "Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers."
(Karl Marx) - "Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will."
(Virginia Woolf) - "Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages."
(H. L. Mencken) - "Character acting is, of course, one of the four things that the British still do supremely well, the others being soldiering, tailoring, and getting drunk in public."
(Anthony Lane, "Private Wars." The New Yorker, January 5, 2009) - "The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office."
(President Dwight Eisenhower) - "I [retained] the Habit of expressing my self in Terms of modest Diffidence, never using when I advance anything that may possibly be disputed, the Words Certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the Air of Positiveness to an Opinion; but rather say, I conceive, or I apprehend a Thing to be so or so, It appears to me, or I should think it so or so."
(Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography) - "People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children."
(Bill Watterson)
Pronunciation: BOOST-ing
