Hi, everyone. I'm Jade. I'm talking about informal intensifiers today and this is a
way to make a story more dramatic and it's what we use as native speakers when we're,
yeah, telling a story.
So when we're telling a story, we'll put in these adverbs to add drama you could say.
But we... We've got a choice of intens-... They're otherwise known as intensifiers. We've
got a choice of what words we can use. Any they depend... And the words we choose depend
on the context and they depend on the kind of story you want to tell. So let's...
Firstly, to describe what "posh" is. In the UK, "posh" means belonging to a higher social
class. It could be a way of behaving, it could be a way of speaking. So we have that in England
because of the queen and all stuff like that, and that's just the way English British society
is. So posh people use different words in their speech. So in their speech, these are
the preferred words for posh English. So someone might say: "When my contact lens was in my
eye, it was fairly uncomfortable." Or "rather" has the same meaning. "It was my eye. I was
rather upset." And they mean the same thing. They mean like: "quite".
Not used so much nowadays, but in the past, posh people liked to say: "Terribly" and "Awfully"
and they didn't mean them as terrible/awful. They actually mean the opposite, they mean
"very" and "good". "I went to the party and it was a terribly lovely party and there were
many people there." Or you could say: "Borris is an awfully good chap." That means: "very
good chap" for a posh person. Posh language is going to prefer these informal intensifiers.
Neutral English-sometimes posh people will use it too-neutral English, we would use all
of these adverbs mostly. So you would be intensifying a story by saying: "I was in so much pain."
And you really make the "so" long: "So much pain" when you're telling a story. Again,
you can emphasize the "really". "I was really stressed." You could say that. One thing to
mention about "quite" is they mean... It means the same thing as "fairly", but "fairly" is
more posh and "quite" is more in the middle or whatever. And "too" means negative. So:
"When my contact lens got stuck in my eye..." This sentence is not going to work. The sentence
I'm thinking of, you'd say something is too expensive as in too much for a negative when
you're using this adverb.
But we have even more choice for informal intensifiers. We have slang words. So I'm
going to teach you some English slang that people use. "Bare" means "very" and "nough"
also means "very". You couldn't... You could write the... You could write this on Facebook
or in chat or something, but you couldn't write it anywhere formally. "And when my contact
lens got stuck in my eye, I was bare stressed. You know that." Or: "I couldn't get it out.
I was nough upset. I didn't know what to do." They mean... "Nough" I used it like "really"
there. So you also have this option if you wish.
And I don't know about in your country, but English people swear quite a lot. I don't
really swear, I don't really like it. But here is swear words you can use. You probably
know this one, I bet you know this one. But do you know this one? "Bloody" it's not a
very strong swear word anymore. At the end of my story I said: "The bloody contact lens
finally came out." You call something "bloody" if it's irritating or annoying. It used to
be strong, it's not so bad now. And here are two other ones. I found that people say these
ones when they don't like to say this one. They sound kind of like this one and they're
a little bit more polite swear words. And they sound like this: "frigging" or "flipping".
"My flipping contact lens got stuck in my eye."
So what's the position of the informal intensifiers when they're in sentences? Let's take a look.
So we can do adverb before adjective with "rather", "quite" and "really". Here's an
example sentence. You could use any of them. "I'd rather want a sandwich. Don't you know?"
So the position here is before the verb. These ones.
What about this one? "Don't be so bloody stupid." It's not a very nice thing to say to someone.
And the grammar here is "so" + swear word + adjective. So you could change it, you could
say: "Don't be so beep stupid." If you wanted to.
And what about the slang words? These are newer words. I don't think the grammar is
that evolved for them because people just use them in speech. The position is usually
after the verb like in a sentence. "It was bare jokes." "Jokes" is also slang. We usually
say: "a joke" which is a noun. But "jokes" in slang means "funny" as an adjective. So
yeah, you could say: "It was nough jokes." Means it was really funny also.
And what about this one? "Sarah is terribly charming." That means that she is very charming.
Remember what I said? They mean the opposite. "Sarah is terribly charming." How do we do
that then? It's "to be" followed by adverb followed by adjective.
And, yeah, now I want to talk to you about a nonstandard use that I've observed quite...
I've observed people using it quite a lot, but it's considered not grammatically correct.
But I'll point it out to you in case you hear it. You can decide to use it if you want because
people do say it or you can decide not to use it if you'd like to say everything grammatically
correctly. So some people would say something like this: "I so want those shoes!" We don't
put "so" in this... In this position before the verb. We could say: "I really want those
shoes!" But in British English, it's not considered correct to put "so" here. Anyway, you know
now. You can decide if you want to say that.
Let's look, finally, at the position of swear words with nouns. So here are two examples:
"The kitchen was a bloody mess." Wherever I lived when I was a student, that was a true
sentence for me. "The kitchen was a bloody mess." "A mess" is a noun for an untidy place.
So the grammar we've got here is the swear word and then followed by the noun. "A bloody
mess".
And our last example: "Their customer service is a flipping joke." So you won't want to
go back there, will you? So yeah, just something that you can start to use to enrich your storytelling
more in English. I really recommend that.
And the next thing I recommend is for you to go to the engVid website and do the quiz
on this so that they will become a little bit more familiar to you and you're getting
these intensifiers in the correct position. Please do subscribe to this channel and watch
some of my other videos as well; more for you to learn. Also, not just my engVid channel,
my other channel because I've got two YouTube channels. Yay! And you can learn there and
you can learn here with me. So I'd really appreciate you to subscribe in both places.
So I'm finished now. I'm going to go. I'm going to go and swear at some people in the
street. No, not really. Okay, see you.