Reasons to pity people who have to learn English, #1 in a series of many

[undyingking]

It must be very puzzling to find out that when you say someone is 'quite pretty', 'quite nice', 'quite angry' etc, you mean they are 'somewhat [X]'; but if you say they are 'quite gorgeous', 'quite delightful', 'quite furious' etc, you mean they are 'extremely [X]'.

'Quite' as a modifier seems to mean 'a bit' when applied to a normal-type quality, but 'absolutely' when applied to an extreme-type quality. As native speakers we have a lifetime of context to tell us which is which. But even so there are grey areas: for example, the first sentence of this post could have started "It must be quite puzzling..." which could really have had either meaning.

Sometimes these English ambiguities relate to the language's split roots as a Germanic structure overlaid with Romance formalism. But I don't know if that's the case with this one, ie. I think it's polysemy (the word meaning has split in two) rather than homonymy (two unrelated words that happen to be the same). It would be interesting to know what are the histories of the two usages.

Can you think of other such confusing setups? Or a clearer way to explain this one?

Comments

[ninthcouncil.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that the different meanings are also signalled by a differing pattern of stress and tone in speech, but that this cannot be communicated in the text.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, indeed. (Or rather: quite so.)

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

I once had a telephone conversation with someone who I assume was a native English speaker. We were having a disagreement and I said "there's obviously no way we can get any further, as we're both quite certain that we are in the right." She said "No, I'm not quite certain, I'm 100% certain." I of course meant precisely that.

She was wrong too.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Of course she was ;-)

For me, 'certain' is very firmly in the second category. Surprising that anyone should think it was the first.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Someone qualifies an absolute: do you (a) assume that they intended to qualify it, and it was not absolute, or (b) assume that they intended that absolute, and the qualification is redundant.

"Quite certain", and "100% certain" are both silly phrases. You're either actually certain, or not actually certain.

[mrlloyd.livejournal.com]

Agree, and at least in the written word you always come out sounding stronger if you avoid the redundancy.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Silly yes, but I think it's sufficiently well established as a rhetorical technique (hyperaffirmation I think it's called) that you couldn't safely rule out that arm of the ambiguity on that basis. People do quite often say silly things and mean them...

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

As I say in my other post, I agree with what you should assume. I'm just not (quite) astonished that someone assumed the other.

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

That would seem to be being used to mean 'absolutely/extremely' & 'moderately', respectfully...the second of which is a little stronger than what undyingking was suggesting.

I'm not sure I'd think of the 'weak' version of it as being even a /bit/ positive, rather that it actually diminishes the following adjective...it's that remarkable use of the English languagte, without being necessarally overtly sarcastic, to quietly damn with faint praise...eg:

Horrid
Not at all nice
Not nice
Quite nice
Nice
Very nice
Charming

whereas analytically, one would expect 'quite nice' to fall between 'nice' and 'very nice'...and probably sometimes it does.

There's something in the intonation or timing which changes which one is meant, and I'm struggling to put my finger on it.

"That vase? Oh, it's [micropause] quite nice. [change of subject]." = disparaging. It's almost as if a reflexive judgement has been made, and the emphasis is on the silence, with 'quite' being grasped for as a polite filler to avoid vocalising the actual judgement.

"That vase? Oh, it's quite nice. [further comment on some detail that is liked; or disliked with a '..., though' modifier]" = neutral through to faintly positive. Again, the reflexive judgement is made, but because it's a 'safe' judgement to start with, it flows without a pause, because it doesn't hit the mental autocorrect.

Not sure you'd ever use 'quite nice' in the superlative sense - 'nice' would be replaced by something stronger.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

and probably sometimes it does

Mm, indeed. I wonder whether other languages are actually also as ridden with subtle ambiguity as this, and it's just that I don't speak any of them well enough to pick up on it.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite certain

See also: ambiguity in 'not quite', discussed in a comment to floralaetifica below.

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

In this case, for me, it's not two separate meanings at all, it's just English under- and over-statement. We regularly say stuff which means one thing when taken literally, but which in practice means something much more or less than that. This always reminds me of how classic upper-class speech involves extremes of both kinds, applied in the opposite way that you would expect: eg we have both 'this cake is absolutely heavenly' and 'it's a bit of a bore, cancer'.

'Quite' means 'completely' - 'quite right'. So when we say 'quite gorgeous', we mean 'completely gorgeous'. When we say 'quite nice', we also mean 'completely nice', but in this case, the tone of reserve means that that's not quite what we mean. Similarly 'rather nice' and 'rather wonderful' - it's not that rather is changing its meaning, it's just that we love to say something different from what we mean.

In the case of 'quite', though, we've been doing it so long that people do tend to think that 'quite' means 'a bit', and you're right that these days that sense alse depends on what word it's attached to, not just the tone you use. So perhaps you could say that the meaning has changed or is changing. But I think it's more accurate to say that it's just our way of playing with words.

I used to have so much fun with Damian, who loved this stuff. He was always spotting some little linguistic inconsistency that we never even think about. For example, the word 'capable'. It can be a real compliment if said with meaning ('She's a really capable person'), but if said with reserve ('She's capable' *shrug*), it's an insult by way of not giving more effusive praise. A lot like these 'quites'.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, that sounds quite plausible¹ to me as an explanation of the origin of the ambiguity. I think the evidence of sesquipedality's interlocutor, etc, is sufficient to show that for practical purposes the understatement meaning is now separate, and maybe even dominant in some subsectors of English. The original 'completely' meaning may be on its way to being archaic.

The 'capable' example is interesting, that hadn't struck me at all before. I guess we can do this with pretty much any adjective if we put our minds to it!

---

1 To be taken either way, as preferred.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

The understatement / overstatement thing also applies to 'not quite' I guess. The meaning 'almost', ie. the negation of quite=completely, is still dominant. But people frequently use it understatedly (or sarcastically) to mean 'not even close'.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

In this case, for me, it's not two separate meanings at all, it's just English under- and over-statement.

Indeed, this is the impression I get.

Nonetheless, the rule Mo gives seems to work well in most cases. Or at least as well as any rule applied to English!

Also, sometimes it's not just the modified word which provides the clue. If I wrote "there was a cartoon in the back of the paper which Dawn found quite amusing" that would be interpreted by most English speakers very differently from "there was a cartoon in the back of the paper which Dawn found really quite amusing". The former cartoon sounds as though it was just barely worth reading, whilst the latter was evidently a timeless classic!

Even here we're only talking about writing aimed at people whom the writer does not know. For example if I were to write "Bea was quite disappointed that we had to skip snack time" in an email to Dawn I would do so knowing that she would understand my intended meaning even if the canonical interpretation would be the other way.

[(Anonymous)]

'Bea was quite disappointed...'

Hah, and overstatement turned into an understatement! Very English.

I actually think a lot of English speakers would hazzard a guess that that was a wry understatement. We do it habitually.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Yes, indeed.

(I'm failing to guess who you are, though. I assume LJ logged you out unexpectedly?)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Sounds like floralaetifica to me. We shall see...

*steeples fingers in a sinister manner*

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I thought not - floralaetifica can spell! :-)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Whoever it was wil be too embarrassed to admit, now you've pointed that out ;-)

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Lexicographers disagree, and state that the word has two different meanings:

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/quite_1

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/quite_2

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/quite

Of course it could be that lexicographers are too literal-minded. Either way, they agree that the weak meaning is an evolution from the strong meaning.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Meg and I work on the assumption that it's a difference between British and US English; when she says "quite" to modify an adjective then it's as an intensifier, but when I say "quite" then it's as a... diminisher, I suppose. (Exception: "quite nice" is the most barely veiled of "I don't like it but I'm putting up with it" reactions when applied to food.)

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

Yes, Julian Barnes' Letters from London makes the distinction between British and US usage somewhere I think.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Interesting! I didn't know that about US usage.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

That's the thing, the basics of English are very easy to learn, it's intricacies like this that take ages to master.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I must say, I greatly admire anyone who tries it.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

To construct a rule of thumb, I suggest that there are some English adjectives which we typically use with modifiers to indicate a sliding scale. You might say that someone is "fairly pretty" or "very pretty", "fairly nice", "a bit angry, but not especially so".

Other adjectives are rarely used in this way, and when they are it's often with whimsical intent. You can say that someone was "a little bit gorgeous", "very delightful", and "somewhat furious", but that's not a plain assessment, it's probably ironic.

I submit that with the former kind of adjective, "quite" means "somewhat", and with the latter kind of adjective, "quite" means "utterly". Perhaps in the latter case we're taking an adjective which is usually (if not formally) absolute, and making it absolute. The fact that it isn't usually a sliding scale rules out the former (corrupted) meaning of "quite".

Learning which adjectives are which is still left as an exercise for the reader, though. In all three of your examples, the second of the pair means "very [the first of the pair]", though, so I'd guess start with that. I'm sure there are plenty of counter-examples, and of course the more qualifiers in an English sentence, the more likely that the meaning is indirect anyway.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, I chose my examples on that basis to make the distinction clear. I suspect though that even in the cases of those three pairs, you could find a third adjective inbetween, that some people would think meant 'very [the first]', but others would think was just a similar-value variation on [the first].

Don't knock it

[(Anonymous)]

Abuse of vocabulary is one of the great glories of the English Language. Ambiguity and Innuendo make the language so much richer.

My favourite is "know" -mostly because it gets the philosophers in such a muddle: they can't seem to understand that it has an absolute definition and is almost* invariably used about a less absolute situation. [not that there aren't some good thoughts on the subject]

It is my understanding that other languages have a lot less of this than we do. German is (unless I'm badly mislead) much much more definite (one reason it's popular for scientific papers). French is looser but doesn't reach our levels of ambiguity and innuendo.

It can be somewhat problematic when trying to be precise -I wonder if foreign legal documents are easier to read...


* you can make actually definite statements of knowledge so long as you are speaking in the present tense about the state of your own mind.

Re: Don't knock it

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, I certainly wouldn't knock it, mysterious anonymous commenter -- just glad that I'm a native speaker and didn't have to learn my way through all this. Particularly if coming from a language where the whole notion of ambiguity was weak or frowned-upon.

It would be interesting to know if other, more remote, languages have the same characteristic - one might imagine a tonal spoken tongue like Chinese, for example, conveying a wealth of shades of meaning, but I don't know enough about it to say for sure.