Recently Nathan Bierma wrote about the use of intensifiers, such as "very" or "so" or "pretty." A linguistics student had the job of watching every episode of the first 8 years of "Friends," recording all the intensifiers. [Why didn't I ever get an assignment like that in grad school???]

Interestingly, he found a different trend in the use of intensifiers. Previous research showed the following intensifiers to be the most prevalent:

Very - 40%
Really - 30%
So - 10%
Absolutely - 3%
Pretty - 3%

The "Friends" study showed:

So - 45%
Really - 25%
Very - 15%
Pretty - 6%
Totally - 2%

So...so is on the rise.

While linguists find that television doesn't seem to affect regional use of language, gradually intensifiers do change. He gave as an example, from the 12th Century, "swithe," changing to "well" and "right." Can't say that I've heard of "swithe!"

Have you seen a change in intensifiers? "Totally" does seem to be used more often, and I suppose people more often make statements like, "That is so 70s" (specifically, my kids! )

I've noticed that both "totally" and "so" are starting to fade away. "Uber" seems to be used a lot more now, especially on the internet.

Among African-Americans(or at least, black comedians), the word "mad" is now used as an intensifier, not really meaning "very", but pretty close.

I've also noticed a rise in the word "wicked" as an intensifier. "That is wicked bad".

That seems to be a Boston thing. In the mid 90's, that's "wicked" meant that's "cool". It fell out of favor rather quickly. In Boston, though, it is a common synonym for "very", although with much more intensity.

I wonder how biased "Friends" is as a source, bearing in mind that its main characters are all meant to be middle-class, white, 20-30-something, New Yorkers. Someone who watched "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air", for instance, might come up with a totally different count.

Also, I wonder why they didn't watch the last two series?