Pretty Adverb

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, it’s Bill Waters here.

Hey, Bill, where are you calling us from?

From Marquette, Michigan.

Well, welcome. What can we do for you?

I’m puzzled by a particular use of the word pretty.

I don’t know if that’s a universal idiom or if it’s peculiar to the United States, but I know we’d be hard-pressed to express ourselves about certain things that impact us mightily if we couldn’t say pretty, as in pretty good, pretty bad.

Bob’s pretty good bank. Bertha’s pretty good kitty boutique.

Bill, that’s really interesting. What brought this to your mind? Why were you thinking about pretty?

Well, I’m kind of a backwards scholar of languages generally, and I can speak several. And in none of those that I’m familiar with, does that combination show up as universally as it does in English?

Is that an oxymoron? Pretty good? Or pretty bad? Pretty awful? That kind of thing. And yet it’s so commonly accepted and hardly ever questioned.

In some ways, it just doesn’t make sense to me. So I come to the experts for help.

Yeah, we’ll never look to English for logic because you’re going to go away disappointed almost every time.

When we go back to the origin of pretty in Old English, it actually didn’t mean anything like it does today. It was more about being cunning or crafty or being adept at something.

It moves on to being clever or skillful. Eventually, it becomes elegant or artful. And then we reach this really interesting point where pretty kind of means what it does today. That’s the 15th century or so.

But there’s a kind of patronizing tone to it, definitely in opposition to beautiful. If I called something pretty or someone pretty, it didn’t mean that I thought that they were worthy of adoration. It meant that there was something superficially attractive about them and that it wasn’t any kind of deep-seated quality in their nature or their being. That was in the original sense of the word.

Yeah, yeah. And so what we start to see pretty quickly is that almost derogatory use of pretty, a dismissive way of, well, she’s just pretty, instead of she’s beautiful. We start to see that over 100 years or so transform.

And so by the 1600s, well into the 1600s, pretty starts to have these two meanings where you can say something is pretty good or pretty nice. And what we have is, I would almost call it a reverse intensifier. It’s a weakener where the word that pretty is attached to, the adjective it’s attached to, takes a little bit less power.

If I say pretty good, that’s not as good as good, right? If I say pretty nice, that’s not as nice as nice. And we find that again and again, unlike other intensifiers, such as if I say it’s a whopping good pizza you’ve made there. Well, that means the good is even more good than good, right?

And so then that gets us to where we are today, where if someone is called, that’s a pretty nice shirt. I’m actually probably not complimenting the shirt very much, am I? Unless you add something like another modifier, like that’s a daggone pretty shirt you’re wearing today.

Well, and then it’s the other meaning of pretty. Then it becomes the one that has something to do with the attractiveness.

Yeah, I’m thinking of the movie Pretty Woman. I mean, what if they called it Beautiful Woman? Beautiful Woman, right? Maybe it wouldn’t have worked as well.

Yeah, I grew up with pretty being a pretty positive word. You know, all you want to be pretty when you grow up.

There’s another pretty which we use. For example, if I say that you were in a pretty pickle, it doesn’t mean that there was an attractive pickle. That means it was quite some pickle, and that is an intensifying use of pretty. That means a problem of some great proportion.

Okay, well, I think I got it now. I think I got it.

Yeah, but hundreds of years of this split use of pretty.

Okay, well, you got that cleared up for me. I appreciate that. Thank you very much, Bill, for calling.

Glad to help.

Okay, my pleasure. Bye, Bill.

We have another word in English that behaves like pretty, and that’s fair and fairly, right?

Yeah, I never thought of that. That’s a fairly good test score.

Yeah, fairly good. That’s a fair deal.

Yeah, yeah, it does. It cuts into it a little bit, right?

Yeah. It dilutes it a little bit. And it’s kind of like the British quite.

Quite or rather.

Rather, yeah, yeah. But it doesn’t mean very. It doesn’t mean very. It means kind of a negative version of very. A little less than quite. A little less than rather.

Yeah. Amazing what happens when you just bore into one single word.

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