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