‘That's proper cool’

Abstract

Intensifying adverbs are devices which scale a quality up, down, or somewhere between the two (Bolinger 1972: 17). To intensify the adjectivecool, speakers of British English have a variety of functionally equivalent intensifiers at their disposal. They can usevery,really,so,dead,bloody,rightandwell, among many others. A seemingly recent arrival to the British intensifier system isproper, as inthat was proper cool. Believed to have entered English from the Latinpropriusvia Norman French (OED,proper),propernow has a variety of denotations in Present Day English. As an adjective, it can denote suitability (e.g.,wear the proper equipment), etiquette (e.g.,it wouldn't be proper to do that) and worthiness/authenticity (e.g.,it's proper street food). As an adverb,propercan function as an adverb of manner (e.g.,we like to do things proper in our house), and a marker of degree (e.g.,he is proper tall); the degree function applying exclusively to British English. Some examples ofproperintensifying adjectives from the present dataset are reported in (1).