Zeno's Bar & Grill
Thursday, September 08, 2005
So, Totally, Very
We former teens of the 80’s are, like, totally out of it.
An article by Nathan Bierma in the Tribune yesterday reported on a linguist from the University of Toronto who studied the way the characters on the TV show “Friends” used intensifiers. He watched every episode from the first eight seasons (1994-2001).
A little grammar lesson: an intensifier is an adverb that modifies adjectives and verbs to create more emphasis (such as, “very”, “rather”, and “so”)
I think that every “Friends” fan can so guess which intensifier came out on top. Clocking in at 45 percent, “so” was the definite winner, with “really” at a distant second, and the old standby “very” coming in third with only 15 percent.
And, as you might have guessed, the intensifier “totally” was used only 2 percent of the time on “Friends”, and I’m guessing that was during the fat Monica high school flashback scenes.
--Kelly
An article by Nathan Bierma in the Tribune yesterday reported on a linguist from the University of Toronto who studied the way the characters on the TV show “Friends” used intensifiers. He watched every episode from the first eight seasons (1994-2001).
A little grammar lesson: an intensifier is an adverb that modifies adjectives and verbs to create more emphasis (such as, “very”, “rather”, and “so”)
I think that every “Friends” fan can so guess which intensifier came out on top. Clocking in at 45 percent, “so” was the definite winner, with “really” at a distant second, and the old standby “very” coming in third with only 15 percent.
And, as you might have guessed, the intensifier “totally” was used only 2 percent of the time on “Friends”, and I’m guessing that was during the fat Monica high school flashback scenes.
--Kelly
