Monday 21 June 2021

I extremely like this

Just a quick one this week to point out a nice non-standard usage of the word extremely. The context was as follows: 

I extremely need a break from those things. 

Extremely can normally only modify adjectives, so extremely cold, extremely unlucky, extremely happy, and so on. Here it's modifying a verb, need, which is extremely unusual and not at all like its normal behaviour. This was on twitter where one can do such things to signify metalinguistic information like hyperbole or being a bit extra. 

And it works ok with extremely because even though it doesn't normally modify verbs, we do have other adverbs (which is what extremely is) which do this job: I really need a break, I desperately need a break, I so need a break. So it's not that much of a leap to bring extremely into service in this way with its usual meaning of 'to the greatest degree possible'. 

No comments:

Post a Comment