A Bit of Alright

A hot topic of discussion in the Jones household these past few weeks – we’re crazily exciting – has been the subtle slide of (young) English speakers to using nouns as adjectives. 

I had said something was “a bit crap”, and my dad retorted that, if at all, it was “a bit crappy”. I try and be correct in my language usage – or, at to be more precise, to only break the rules deliberately – so this misstep made ponder about where this had come from. We couldn’t think of too many examples: I’ve heard people refer to things as “pretty shit”, or “kind of poo”, and, notably, the ABC’s The Hungry Beast has a segment highlighting things they think are “a little bit bullshit.”

So, when did we start corrupting “crappy” and “shitty” to just “crap” and “shit”? And is it something confined to defecations-related words? 

The latter hypothesis I rejected when I caught myself saying something could be “pretty fun”, which also gave me an insight into how this usage developed. You see, no-one’s ever said, “that was a bit funny” and meant it was enjoyable, so there’s no way saying “that was a bit fun” came from there – this reasoning is even stronger for “it’s kind of poo” or “that’s a little bit bullshit”, for which adjective variants (it’s kind of pooey / that’s a little bit bullshitty) are highly unusual to non-existent.

No, the progression comes from the straight comparative construction: “that is crap”, “it was fun”, etc.; we’re saying that one thing is equivalent to another thing, in it’s entirety. However, though these words are originally nouns, in this usage – and possibly in others ‐ they are used in the same way as adjectives. And once we start using them as adjectives here, we’ve obviously started using them as adjectives in other cases; modifying and qualifying them. Thus, things become “a bit crap”, rather than “a bit crappy”, or even “a bit of crap”. (We still use that last one, but in the original comparative sense as a noun.)

Now that I’m aware of the “mistake”, I wonder how often I’ll notice myself doing it…