{"id":989,"date":"2010-05-22T09:19:05","date_gmt":"2010-05-21T23:19:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordconstructions.com.au\/blog\/?p=989"},"modified":"2012-07-31T10:28:29","modified_gmt":"2012-07-31T00:28:29","slug":"absolute-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wordconstructions.com.au\/blog\/2010\/05\/absolute-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Absolute words"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier in the week I wrote a post about products being exclusively available in one department store<\/a>\u00a0being a misleading statement (things are either exclusive or they aren’t!) and it reminded me of an article I wrote in my newsletter some time ago (it was my\u00a0November 2004 newsletter<\/a>\u00a0to be precise!)<\/p>\n

Here is what I wrote back then:<\/p>\n

Don’t over qualify<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

There are a group of words that have very precise meanings – these words don’t need any qualifying to make them strong, and in fact it is grammatically wrong to attempt qualifying them.<\/p>\n

For instance, the word unique means one of a kind so something is either unique or it isn’t – ‘very unique’, ‘particularly unique’, ‘most unique’ and similar combinations are unnecessary.<\/p>\n

Other words that are commonly misused in this way are:<\/p>\n

Electrocuted<\/a> – the word actually means to be killed by electricity, not receive an electric shock.<\/p>\n

Perfect – means there can be no improvement; adding ‘very’ to it doesn’t serve any purpose.<\/p>\n

Fatal – means deadly. An accident is fatal or it isn’t, it can’t be ‘very fatal’ or ‘really fatal’.<\/p>\n

In most of these examples, they can be qualified by using a word such as ‘almost’ or ‘nearly’; the word unique, however, can’t be qualified at all.<\/p>\n

What other words can you think of that are absolute in their own right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier in the week I wrote a post about products being exclusively available in one department store\u00a0being a misleading statement (things are either exclusive or they aren’t!) and it reminded me of an article I wrote in my newsletter some time ago (it was my\u00a0November 2004 newsletter\u00a0to be precise!) Here is what I wrote back […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,272],"tags":[1032,1033,1035,1030,1034],"class_list":["post-989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grammar-details-2","category-monday-meanings","tag-absolute","tag-exclsuive","tag-perfect","tag-qualify","tag-unique"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t