Of intensives used to modify adjectives and adverbs, it may in general be said that most of them are adverbs derived from adjectives expressing absolute qualities, ie such as do not admit of variation, as, for example, pure, full, very, which in their strictest sense do not admit of degrees of comparison.

For this reason they were naturally pitched upon to express the notion of completeness of a quality, so that, as we shall see in the sequel, pure blind, which has afterwards changed both its form and its meaning (purblind), originally meant completely blind». But most of those intensives that originally expressed completeness, have in course of time come to mean merely a high degree of a quality; and this is in exact accordance with one of the well-established facts of word-history. Frequent use is apt to weaken the sense of a word: the general run of speakers are so much given to using hyperbolical language, to laying it on thick», that the very words they use for this purpose will come to be discounted in the public estimation, and taken for what they are worth, Stoffel, Intensives and Down-toners. 1