The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. Hmm, it seems to me that "semantic prosody" is a compact term for describing the phenomenon I was talking about when I said, "People see utter/utterly used more often with negative adjectives, so they tend to use it that way themselves, which reinforces the association with negativity.Instead of being hurt, denying, defending himself, begging forgiveness, instead of remaining indifferent evenanything would have been better than what he did dohis face utterly involuntarily (reflex spinal action, reflected Stepan Arkadyevitch, who was fond of physiology) utterly involuntarily assumed its habitual, good-humoured, and therefore idiotic smile.Įssenes being utterly ignored in the New Testament (a fact so easily explained by _my_ theory, a fact so _utterly_ unaccountable to _his_) he conceived an affection for them. Your BNC results are much more illuminating than my google hits, of course. My point was that, while it can be used with positive words (which was what Mark was arguing), I think it's still used more with negative words. I think an evolution analogy is appropriate, because words and their usages do "evolve" in a similar fashion. Well, if you look at it from an evolutionist's standpoint, the chicken and the chicken egg came about at the same time. Anyway, so far we don't have anything statistically conclusive, but it looks to me that so far we have a plurality of negative usages. The choice of using "utterly" might have more to do with the adjective itself than how it's being used in context. A few of these are words that are typically negative but in context were used in a positive sense: outrageous, strange. Six of these were nouns used in names using "utterly" with a noun generally doesn't occur in speech, so these names are unusual. ridiculous (blog title intended connotation unclear)Īlmost half of these are clearly negative. true (part of title: The Utterly True Adventures of a Pathological Liar. horses (name of a website: Utterly Horses)Ģ6. A quick google for "utterly" shows the word utterly used with these words, in order :Ĥ. but I think Pos is right that it's used with negative words for often. It can certainly be used with positive words - "utterly gorgeous", "utterly brilliant", etc. When you think about it, words ultimately had to come from somewhere, but you only have sounds to work with, so it wouldn't surprise me that the sound of a word can have a greater effect on its meaning - or the meaning of a word can have an effect on its sound - than might be first apparent. :)īut all of those sounds have "ur" in a stressed position (indeed, most of them are monosyllables), whereas "utter" has it in an unstressed position, where it doesn't have as strong as an effect. but I can't really think of many positive words that have the "ur" sound, other than "purr", "flirt".įinally, "turkey" is just comical rather than positive or negative. Some are more neutral, like herd, urge, surge, quirk, discern, concur, circle, circa. A lot of words with a "ur" sound in them have some kind of negative association with them: burp, usurp, twerp, turd, nerd, slur, hurt, dirt, jerk, lurk, lurch, murky, stern. but I think there's something to the sound theory. Of course, all this is just conjecture on my part. The schwa at the beginning doesn't really help there, either. sounds like something a caveman might say. There's something about the "ur" sound that is a just little rough.
It's not one of the harshest-sounding words in the language, but it's not particularly euphonic, either, especially in rhotic dialects (like most American English) with the terminal "r".
It could also just be the sound of the word.
It could be that these phrases became common first, and then their commonality associated the word "utter" with negativity. There are some particularly common examples with negative words: "utter chaos" and "utter ruins" leap to mind most readily. People see utter/utterly used more often with negative adjectives, so they tend to use it that way themselves, which reinforces the association with negativity.
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