Quite

Strangers write to me all the time to express their language peeves. (I don’t know why; few people are less likely to sympathize with random peeves than I am.) Recently a man wrote to tell me that he had a specific adverb that he hated: “The first word I would eliminate from the English language is ‘quite’. It rarely adds anything.”

Notice that he wants to “eliminate” the word, not just leave it in the lexical toolbox for others to use. Three unsavory tendencies probably reinforce each other here: (1) the familiar “get-rid-of-the-adverbs” nonsense preached by bad usage handbooks and writing advice sites; (2) the curious phenomenon that Language Log calls word rage; and (3) the kind of crusading linguistic purism that aims not just at personal improvement but at bossing other people around.

Quite is one of the primitive adverbs, not derived from adjective stems by the addition of -ly. It’s an interesting little word. Like just or only, it can modify almost anything: an adjective in quite alarming; an adverb in quite pathetically; a noun phrase in quite a commotion; a preposition phrase in quite out of order; and so on. And as the quotations given by the Oxford English Dictionary entry clearly show, it is basically an intensifier (like very, for example): It means “fully” in the sense that quite X means “fully meriting the application of the term X.”

There is nothing wrong with intensifiers. “Broadly prepared” and “fully prepared” are different states, and distinguishing them is not redundant. It’s true that omitting an intensifier frequently keeps the truth value unchanged: Wherever “has very large debts” applies, “has large debts” will also apply. That doesn’t make very redundant: Due diligence may call for adverbs.

But people occasionally point out that quite is different from very in a curious way: It has a wobbly meaning that sometimes seems to switch to its own opposite. Sometimes it has an enhancing effect (She’s quite fantastic seems even stronger than She’s fantastic), but in other cases it seems to have a downgrading effect (She’s quite good seems decidedly lukewarm, worse than very good). How can a sensible word sometimes mean “absolutely” and sometimes mean “only moderately”?

I don’t think it’s a dialect difference between American and British English, though I’ve heard that alleged. (Americans sometimes misread educated British understatement or irony.) I’d need some serious quantitative evidence to convince me the dialects had different meanings for quite; I see only a few trivial differences in idioms (quite something is mainly American; quite so for “yes” is rather British; etc.).

I think the apparent ambiguity can be explained in a very satisfying way, without any very complex semantic analysis.

To make the grade for inclusion under what people would be prepared to call “good” on a scale from hopeless to perfect, a mediocre score will suffice. To be appropriately called “fantastic,” you need to score extremely high. But quite does exactly the same to each: It says the application of the term is fully merited.

Thus you can be called “quite good” if you fully meet the criteria for counting as “good”—but that’s not a high bar to jump (it’s lower than “very good”), so the judgment sounds lukewarm.

And your performance is “quite fantastic” only if it fully meets the criteria for counting as “fantastic”—which means scoring incredibly high, so quite seems to emphasize mind-blowing greatness when used with that adjective.

So much for the charge that quite has no clear unitary meaning.

Some readers may defend my peeving correspondent by saying that nonetheless you shouldn’t use the word too much. Well of course; but that applies to everything! If you do anything excessively, then try not doing it quite so much. But don’t tell me quite is the problem. If you’re addicted to its overuse, then your addiction is the problem.

No, the nitpickers and word peevers who say good writing avoids adverbs such as quite are just wrong. Take any work on gutenberg.org that you regard as fine writing, download the text, and search. It will have instances of quite in it. Quite rightly so.