Ann Burlingham wrote me a while back with a sighting of innovative scary different, roughly ‘scarily different, different in a scary way’. It’s from Business Week, in a quote:
Even stronger government intervention may be required, several economists said on Mar. 4. “I’ve gone through a number of cycles as an economist on Wall Street, but this one’s different,” says Brian Fabbri, chief economist for BNP Paribas. “This one’s scary different.” (link)
Googling on {“scary different”} pulls up a number of instances that are pretty clearly conveying ‘both scary and different’, but also some predicative examples like the one above, for instance:
It is amazing. It is fun. It is exciting. It is always different but never scary different. It’s enlighteningly different, fun different. (link)
Note the pairing with the adverb enlighteningly. And the adverbial use of fun, conveying ‘in a fun way’ (with the innovative use of fun as an adjective). Here’s another pairing with fun:
The sushi rolls are a little different from the usual California roll and spicy tuna roll – not scary different, but a fun kind of different. (link)
Adverbial scary can modify some other adjectives:
They’re scary huge, but oh so tasty. (link)
There are probably other adjectives, beyond scary and fun, that have been adverbialized (“adved”?).
August 22, 2009 at 3:40 pm |
Scary different. Amazing how language evolves.
Today on CNN here in Taiwan, the news crawl at the bottom of the screen, and I hate that, sometimes I even tape it over for weeks on end, but today it was untaped, the news crawl had a story about Bolt the Jamaican runner, and the headline for the story was “Lightening Bolt’.Can CNN get away with that, global TV with spelling errors, glaring spelling errors like that? Doesn’t CNN have a copyeditor to check the news crawls? It’s embarrassing….
August 22, 2009 at 3:51 pm |
To Danny Bloom: from Brians’s Common Errors:
August 22, 2009 at 4:07 pm |
I think of “scary smart” (q.g.) as the prototypical adverbing of “scary”. Much predated by the more or less parallel “awful smart”, of course.
August 22, 2009 at 4:24 pm |
Does ‘precious little’ qualify?
August 22, 2009 at 5:02 pm |
To Jon Lundell: nice catch with intensifier awful — according to the OED and MWDEU, first used as a mere intensifier with nouns, then later (from 1818 on), in alternation with older awfully, as an intensifier with adjectives and adverbs. (Intensifier awfully and awful have both come in for criticism from usage commentators.)
The history of adverbial scary and awful (and any others that are out there) is hard to work out: they could be short variants of -ly adverbs — there’s plenty of such variation around — or they could be simple extensions of the adjectives to adverbial use (which could be viewed as zero conversions of adjectives).
August 22, 2009 at 5:38 pm |
To Mae Sander: the June 2009 draft revision of the OED has precious as an intensifier with nouns, conveying ‘complete, utter, out-and-out’, from c1475; and as an intensifier with adjectives and adverbs, conveying ‘extremely, very’ (especially in precious few and precious little), from 1775. But there’s also a preciously ‘very greatly; exceedingly, extremely’ (marked as colloquial), attested from 1607. Two 20th-century cites: “preciously near to being involved” (1922), “came preciously close to sucess” (1984).
August 24, 2009 at 12:08 am |
I mentally categorize adverbial scary with adverbial crazy — OED’s got it back to the late 19th c., with adverbial mad going back further still.