Really, intensifiers and qualifiers aren't bad words, not at all. Because they're so brutally overworked, you might actually say they deserve our sympathy.
There's one now actually--a "noise" that Ernest Gowers once dismissed as a "meaningless word" (A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 1965). Actually the word itself isn't meaningless, but when used habitually as verbal filler it rarely adds much to the meaning of a sentence.
Here are a few more words that truly deserve a rest.
- Absolutely
It's a fact: the word absolutely has replaced yes as the most common way of expressing affirmation in English. And not just in American English. A few years back, in a column written for The Guardian newspaper in England, Zoe Williams encouraged a ban on the reiterated absolutely:[P]eople use it to signify agreement. I'll be more precise: when they are agreeing with their friends, they just go "yeah." But when they are playing a game, be it on the telly, the radio, or simply an arguing-game around a domestic table, they suddenly start saying "absolutely." This is fine on the face of it, but I've listened to Radio 4 a lot now, and realized that this usage entails an obligatory repetition. They never just go "absolutely," the buffers. They go "absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely." No word needs saying four times in a row. Not even a swear word.
What's hard to understand is why the simple and emphatic yes has been supplanted by this multisyllabic adverb. - Basically
Though not nearly as annoying as the ubiquitous expressions "bottom line" and "at the end of the day," basically is basically an empty qualifier. In The English Language: A User's Guide (2008), Jack Lynch calls it "the written equivalent of 'Um.'" - Very
This one has been inflating student essays for a very long time. Bryan Garner, author of Garner's Modern American Usage (2009), categorizes very as a weasel word:This intensifier, which functions as both an adjective and an adverb, surfaces repeatedly in flabby writing. In almost every context in which it appears, its omission would result in at most a negligible loss. And in many contexts the idea would be more powerfully expressed without it.
Obviously. And I mean totally.
