Caught on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, in the story “Tyler Saladino’s Quest to Play Major League Baseball”, Saladino admits to being nervous in his quest, but added that “it’s a good nervous”.
A nouning of the adjective nervous, used to convey, roughly, ‘nervousness’.
Plenty of examples of good/bad nervous. Here are a few:
She says she is extremely excited but also a little nervous, but she says it’s a good nervous. (link)
“We’ve been practicing since like October for this so we’re very confident coming into this and we’re nervous but it’s a good nervous,” said Student Meagan Davis. “It’s not like we’re going to do bad nervous.” (link) [note bad nervous as the object of do]
That was certainly one of the most nervous performances I’ve ever had because I kept thinking, ‘Am I going to be able to physically get through this with this possibly broken finger?’ It’s always nervous, sometimes it’s a good nervous, sometimes it’s a bad nervous.” (link)
She is nervous. But I don’t think it’s a bad nervous, it’s the butterflies in your stomach kind of nervous. The kind of nervous I am feeling right now. (link)
Nouning rolls on.
April 2, 2012 at 8:47 am |
I don’t interpret that as the nouning of an adjective, but rather as using the adjective to modify the word “nervous” as a word–a thing, which therefore takes an adjective. Another way to phrase it, which is much more formal in tone, would be as, “the word ‘nervous’ is used here in a positive sense,” or, I suppose, “it’s a good ‘nervous’,” which makes the problem one of punctuation rather than of nouning.
April 2, 2012 at 9:08 am |
So your proposal is that nervous is being mentioned rather than used — or, putting it another way, it’s being used metalinguistically rather than straightforwardly — in these examples. Certainly such things do occur, but it seems unlikely to me that the many examples of “a good/bad nervous” are mostly of this type. Possibly mention/metalinguistic use was a stage on the way to the bulk of the current examples, where nervous looks like it’s been conventionalized as a short synonym of nervousness.