I came across the phrase “positively giddy” in a book over the weekend. It seems like when someone is giddy, they are often “positively giddy.” I thought maybe I was imagining this combo, but it seems to be at least partially confirmed through google-fu: other combinations such as “especially giddy” or “extra giddy” have <= 50% the number of hits as “positively giddy.”
So, you have two somewhat generic words that are not directly related but frequently found together. Is there a word for this? What are some other examples?
If the words really were found together more often that one might otherwise expect, it would be an idiom. However, I am not convinced that that is the case here. “Positively” is being used, in this case, as a simple intensifying adverb, like “very”. As such it is likely to fairly commonly found modifying almost any adjective, though not as often as “very”. I get almost twice as many Google result for “very giddy” as for “positively giddy”.
Then again, I am not convinced that Google’s number of “results” means squat these days, and, like most other aspects of Google, will probably show up as quite different for different people, depending on what it “thinks” you might want.
I take “idiom” to be a commonplace figurative use of language, like when someone “catches the train”. Collocation is more the recurrence of specific word combinations up to the point of cliche. Inner Stickler’s examples are excellent; it’s rare to see anything other than iron described as “wrought”, and one-word-changed equivalents to “wreaking havoc” (like “spreading havoc” or “wreaking destruction”) are otherwise unknown.
Things like “tried and true,” called binomials (appearing often together with “and”) are related. But the good examples of collocation are with otherwise rare words, like “wreak,” or “wroth,” which one waxes.
The word “positively” seems to have evolved a meaning in the sense of an explicitly positive intensifier. I imagine that the implied logic behind this development involves the connotation of “undeniably” or “indisputable”.
When one says “positively giddy”, it seems to mean “so giddy that it cannot be disputed, there can be no mistake about it. Yeah, I was that giddy.”
“Collocation” – nice. I’ve also heard the “fossilized in the phrase” to refer to a two-word phrase where one of the words (or sometimes both of them) are only still used in that phrase, having fallen into disuse otherwise.
The “fossilized” word may also be an otherwise obsolete grammatical construction of a common word; e.g., in “Joy to the world, the Lord is come,” is is a perfect tense helping verb which is now always has, but used to be is for certain verbs (and still is in French – il est venu.)
Cool! That would refer to examples that are written as one word with two parts. The Wikipedia article didn’t mention that this is the basis for several “negative” words that don’t have a “positive” in general use, at least not anymore – e.g., we now have “uncouth” but not “couth.”
I know it’s not quite the question of the thread, but to my ears “positively giddy” sounds like ironic usage. Like someone is making fun of an old-fashioned BrE speaker, something you might say after two sips of Coke as a joke.
To me, “giddy” is just a normal word, not something I would combine with “positively” more often than not.
Of course, it could still be collocation if it is used ironically in that way often enough…
Enter a word, and click “combinations” to see a list of all of the collocations associated with that particular word. The collocations are from the 80,000,000 word British National Corpus (vocabulary database) so the list is very comprehensive.
What makes it especially convenient is that the collocations are organized by part of speech, so if you search for the word “straight” for example, you get…
STRAIGHT + NOUN
straight line
straight hair
(but no Straight Dope!)
VERB + STRAIGHT
fly straight
go straight
etc.
Click on any of those collocations and you can see the actual sentences where the collocations are present from the British National Corpus.
The important distinction between collocations and idioms is that idioms are “a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words” (from the Oxford English Dictionary).
So for example, you have to learn that the idiom “shut up” refers to “be silent” through memorization or through context.
Even if a beginning learner of English knew the individual meanings of “shut” (close) and “up” (upwards), without any context they wouldn’t be able to parse out the meaning “be silent” from the combination of the two.
With other collocations such as “go straight” a beginner could correctly guess the meaning to be “advance” plus “unidirectionally” even without context, if they knew the meanings of the two words already.
I entered “giddy” and got nothing, then entered “positively” and got loads but not “giddy”. Which makes sense to me, because I don’t see “positively giddy” as a collocation.
ETA now I am forever lost in the world of fun that is Just-the-Word.com…
Actually it refers to any utterance where one part (or even both parts) of the utterance is no longer used independently of the other part. We do have couth. Hmmm…it seems we also now have gruntled. I love Linguistics! (Good thing, too, what with my degree being in said field.)
If you want an interesting discussion of the “negative” words/particles/morphemes, you couldn’t do better than reading Otto Jespersen’s take on the “Cycle of Negation”.
Yeah, I don’t think it is a collocation, exactly, but based on this thread it’s the closest to what I was looking for. “Positively giddy” is not in itself a phrase that is commonly used; however, when you use the word “giddy” with a modifier, the modifier appears to be “positively” more often than most other modifiers (but apparently not all, as evidenced earlier in this thread
