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  • Hi, everyone. I'm Jade. I'm talking about informal intensifiers today, and this is a way to make a story more dramatic, and it's what we use as native speakers when we're, yeah, telling a story.

  • So, when we're telling a story, we'll put in these adverbs to add drama, you could say.

  • But we... we've got a choice of inten... they're otherwise known as intensifiers.

  • We've got a choice of what words we can use.

  • Any they depend... and the words we choose depend on the context and they depend on the kind of story you want to tell.

  • So, let's... firstly, to describe what "posh" is. In the UK, "posh" means belonging to a higher social class.

  • It could be a way of behaving, it could be a way of speaking.

  • So, we have that in England because of the queen and all stuff like that, and that's just the way English British society is.

  • So, posh people use different words in their speech.

  • So, in... in their speech, these are the preferred words for posh English.

  • So, someone might say, "When my contact lens was in my eye, it was fairly uncomfortable."

  • Or "rather" has the same meaning. "It was in my eye. I was rather upset."

  • And they mean the same thing. They mean... they mean like, "quite".

  • Not... not used so much nowadays, but in the past, posh people liked to say "terribly" and "awfully", and they didn't mean them as terrible or awful.

  • They actually mean the opposite, they mean "very" and "good".

  • "I went to the party and it was a terribly lovely party and there were many people there."

  • Or you could say: "Borris is an awfully good chap."

  • That means: "very good chap" for a posh person.

  • So, posh language is going to prefer these informal intensifiers.

  • Neutral English, sometimes posh people would use it, too. Neutral English, we would use all of these adverbs mostly.

  • So, you would be intensifying a story by saying, "I was in so much pain."

  • And you really make the "so" long, "so much pain", when you're telling a story.

  • Again, you can emphasize the "really". "I was really stressed." You could say that.

  • One thing to mention about "quite" is they mean...

  • It means the same thing as "fairly", but "fairly" is more posh and "quite" is, you know, more in the middle or whatever.

  • And, "too" means negative. So, "When my contact lens got stuck in my eye..."

  • This sentence is not going to work.

  • The sentence I'm thinking of, you'd say something is too expensive as in "too much", ok? For a negative when you're using this adverb.

  • But we have even more choice for informal intensifiers. We have slang words.

  • So, I'm going to teach you some English slang that people use. "Bare" means "very" and "nough" also means "very".

  • You couldn't... you could write the... you could write this on Facebook or in chat or something, but you couldn't write it anywhere formally.

  • And, "When my contact lens got stuck in my eye, I was bare stressed. You know that."

  • Or, "I couldn't get it out. I was nough upset. I didn't know what to do."

  • They mean... "nough"... I used it like "really" there.

  • So, you also have this option if you wish.

  • And, I don't know about in your country, but English people swear quite a lot.

  • I don't really swear, I don't really like it. But here is swear words you can use.

  • You probably know this one. I bet you know this one. But do you know this one?

  • "Bloody". It's not a very strong swear word anymore.

  • At the end of my story I said, "The bloody contact lens finally came out."

  • You call something "bloody" if it's irritating or annoying.

  • It used to be strong, it's not so bad now. And here are two other ones.

  • I found that people say these ones when they don't like to say this one.

  • They sound kind of like this one, and they're like, a little bit more polite swear words. And they sound like this: "frigging" or "flipping".

  • "My flipping contact lens got stuck in my eye."

  • So, what's the position of the informal intensifiers when they're in sentences? Let's take a look.

  • So, we can do adverb before adjective with "rather", "quite", and "really".

  • Here's an example sentence. You could use any of them. "I'd rather want a sandwich. Don't you know?"

  • So, the position here is before the verb. These ones.

  • What about this one? "Don't be so bloody stupid." It's not a very nice thing to say to someone.

  • And the grammar here is "so" + swear word + adjective. So, you could change it.

  • You could say, "Don't be so (beep) stupid." If you wanted to.

  • And what about these slang words? These are newer words.

  • I don't think the grammar is that evolved for them because people just use them in speech.

  • The position is usually after the verb, like, in a sentence: "It was bare jokes." "Jokes" is also slang.

  • We usually say "a joke" which is a noun. But "jokes" in slang means "funny" as an adjective.

  • So, yeah, you could say, "It was nough jokes." Means it was really funny, also.

  • And, what about this one? "Sarah is terribly charming." That means that she is very charming.

  • Remember what I said? They mean the opposite. "Sarah is terribly charming."

  • How do we do that then? It's "to be" followed by adverb followed by adjective.

  • And, yep, now I want to talk to you about a non-standard use that I've observed quite...

  • I've observed people using it quite a lot, but it's considered not grammatically correct.

  • But I'll point it out to you in case you hear it.

  • You can decide to use it if you want because people do say it or you can decide not to use it if you'd like to say everything grammatically correctly.

  • So, some people would say something like this: "I so want those shoes!"

  • We don't put "so" in this... in this position before the verb. We could say, "I really want those shoes!"

  • But in British English, it's not considered correct to put "so" here. Anyway, you know now.

  • You can decide if you want to say that.

  • Let's look, finally, at the position of swear words with nouns.

  • So, here are two examples: "The kitchen was a bloody mess."

  • Wherever I lived when I was a student, that was a true sentence for me.

  • "The kitchen was a bloody mess." "A mess" is a noun for an untidy place.

  • So, the grammar we've got here is the swear word and then followed by the noun.

  • "A bloody mess".

  • And our last example: "Their customer service is a flipping joke."

  • So, you won't want to go back there, will you?

  • So, yeah, just something that you can start to use to enrich your storytelling more in English. I really recommend that.

  • And the next thing I recommend is for you to go to the engVid website and do the quiz on this, so that they will become a little bit more familiar to you, and you're getting these intensifiers in the correct position.

  • Please do subscribe to this channel and watch some of my other videos as well; more for you to learn.

  • Also, not just my engVid channel, my other channel because I've got two YouTube channels.

  • Yay! And you can learn there and you can learn here with me.

  • So, I'd really appreciate you to subscribe in both places.

  • So, I'm finished now. I'm going to go. I'm going to go and swear at some people in the street.

  • No, not really. Okay, see you.

Hi, everyone. I'm Jade. I'm talking about informal intensifiers today, and this is a way to make a story more dramatic, and it's what we use as native speakers when we're, yeah, telling a story.

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