10.9. Vocabulary. Adjectives.

Adjectives in order of strength. First is the lightest. Most students, and indeed, many native speakers will have differing opinions about which is stronger. The answer is that they are used to refer to slightly different things, and therefore there might be a slight difference in answers in this and the next exercise. If you are that sure that you know better than Zak Washington’s answers below, you clearly spend more time looking at those disgusting magazines and films than he does. You need help. Your answers should be more or less like those below.

Sleazy 8, blue 6, sexy 5, hardcore 10, prudish 1, kinky 7, soft 4, filthy 9, smutty 3, suggestive 2.

Most of the above have nouns derived from them. What are they? Sleaziness is possible but not very common. Two amusing American nouns to describe people are sleaze and sleazebag. Blue describes sexual jokes, films etc, but not people. (In many other languages green is used!) It isn’t possible as a noun. The noun from ‘sexy’ is sexiness and is normally used in a positive sense. Hardcore can be used as a noun too, to describe people or a group, but in the sense of ‘the most radical, believers in a cause or an ideal’. Prudishness is from the same word family as prud which means ‘a person who is shocked or repulsed by anything rude or sexual’. Prudery is another old-fashioned noun, not in modern use. Kinkiness, according to dictionaries, doesn’t exist, but would be typical of a ‘made up’ noun that would be perfectly understood. I can’t imagine in what kind of context you are going to find it useful though! Kinky is a comical way of describing unusual, unorthodox, or exciting sexual behaviour with a normally positive connotation. If you wanted to talk about something unusual, bizarre or unnatural then you would need to use perverted. The meaning is always of disapproval. Softness and filthiness are common nouns mainly because they can refer to many other things, not only material of a sexual nature. Smut is a noun that refers disapprovingly to jokes, programmes, senses of humour etc, that have a high, unsophisticated level of sexual content. Suggestiveness would be possible as a noun, but again is not common. Innuendo is equally common.