30 oct 2004

I'm collecting adverb + adjective set phrases:

refreshingly honest 37.000
fabulously rich 61,200
impossibly difficult 73,300
ridiculously ugly 85,000
woefully inadequate: 89,000
amazingly calm 91,100
tragically hip 116,000
strikingly beautiful 132,000
sadly mistaken 141.000
aggressively intelligent 145,000
abundantly clear 192,000
strangely happy 272,000
overwhelmingly powerful 345,000
incredibly stupid 376,000
desperately poor 444,000
obviously drunk 486,000
happily married 664,000

(indireclty responsible 1,100,000
directly responsible 6,180,000)

easily available 8,800,000

The numbers are approximate google hits. I'm not interested in ones with fewer than fifty thousand or so, since there would be too many of them. "Impeccably dressed" didn't quite make the cut. It strikes me that part of what counts as "knowing a language" is recognizing and being able to use and understand such combinations of words. Yet "good writing" must either avoid or ironize such clichés whenever possible.

One of the most frequent one I've found actually is meaningful, since there is a distinction between being direclty and indirectly responsible for something. When a phrase is extremely common, we know longer even recognize it as a cliché: witness "easily available." These don't seem as interesting to me as the mid-range ones like "sadly mistaken." I suppose if both words are very common then the significance of their combination would be much diminished.

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