Elevating intensifiers

IT’S HARD OUT HERE for a word.

Take the word “good” -- a perfectly good word that has served the English language for well over a millennium, even if you can’t remember two good things lately. But “good” as an adjective is so tired, so frayed. And when modifiers become worn, they lose their original force, just as we working stiffs do by Wednesday noon.

We, of course, can toss down a triple espresso macchiato to kick-start the chi. But an adjective, to regain some pep, must take on an “intensive” or “intensifier,” such as “so”: “It felt so good.” You’ve probably bolstered a feeble word today with one of these standby American intensifiers: very, really, quite, awesomely, amazingly, incredibly, totally, definitely, tremendously, absolutely, extremely.

Now, quick: How many other intensifiers come to mind, not counting the one you use in front of “great” when you get stuck on a freeway? Not many, right? Because just when your life has become more intense than ever, just when wags, pundits and blogapods have sucked the big-money adjectives dry, this nation faces a critical shortage of intensifiers.

And you were worried about, what? Oil running out? Evil cargo in sea containers? Greenland becoming a Slurpee? These things are bad, yes, but how bad? Really bad? Incredibly bad? No, that’s merely how bad it gets, say, on “American Idol.” Without fresh intensifiers, how can we express the degree of “badness” -- or any degrees?

In a recent column on this page, Rosa Brooks decried the puniness of the Democratic Party’s new slogan, “Together, America can do better.” Now, the term “better” is a comparative modifier that surely rocked when still fresh, circa 1250. Had you said, “The new king will be bettre than the one who ate his thumbs,” it would have moved hearts and minds. Today, applied to everything from butter to Botox, “better” moves nothing without a monster truck of an intensifier. But what does our tread-worn stock of intensifiers yield? How about, “Together, America can do totally, amazingly better”? Dude!

The intensifier shortage is seen everywhere. Sports talk. Diplomacy. Entertainment. Academy Award speeches are concussively bad because they hew to such moth-eaten adjectives as “great,” “amazing,” “incredible” and “beautiful,” without a single scintillating intensifier to glam them up. Sure, for red carpet interviews we can Mizrahi a gown to coruscating intensity, Weitzman the shoes of the anointed, beef up a bosom’s expressive force. But we cannot shore up dead modifiers; and so the exultations of even pillow-lipped goddesses fall, with a flump, to the ruby pile underfoot.

America, don’t wait until we have to pull intensifiers from the Gettysburg Address (“altogether fitting”) to relieve the shortage. Take these actions now: Go to the subcultures, like hip-hop, fo’ example, with adjectives so hella blingy they don’t need no intensi-whatzits, no’m’sayin’? “She’s a bottom woman” croons the hero of “Hustle & Flow” of his favorite working girl. Yo, I’m down wid dat modifya, even if it’s 40 years old and kinda nasty.

Let’s welcome foreign intensifiers. Never mind that jackbooted language guardians discourage foreignisms (and intensifiers themselves). Why say “very” when you can cry “molto!” with a molto piccante gesture to drive it home?

Construct “Germanisms,” or multiword modifiers. “Ross-Perot-scare-off-the-women-and-horses crazy,” wrote columnist Maureen Dowd of Howard Dean’s Iowa finale shriek.

Get inventive: Make newsy nouns into adjectives (“a Dubai deal”) or intensifying adverbs: (“Another Dubai-ly dumb decision.”) Join paradoxical modifiers for oh-so-sarcastic effects: “Incandescently dimwitted legislation.” Or go retro: Vintage intensifiers -- especially slang -- can be hauled back into fashion. Drop-dead gorgeous? Nah. “That woman is peachagulu, no-bum-for-looks gorgeous!”

Or you can turn the intensifier shortage to advantage. Almost every pumped-up modifier has a powerful, steroid-free alternative. “Livid” trumps “really mad,” and “fetid” freshens “way smelly.” OK, they’re not always as much fun as gonzo intensifiers. But hard times call for hard measures -- ballistically, backbreakingly, brokebackingly, boy-is-this-intensified-now hard.