Pretty Good Question!

[AndiFlatland]

Can anybody shed any light on this strange anomaly of our language?

How did we ever arrive at the common usage of the word 'pretty' as an adjectival qualifier? eg: This weather's pretty good right now; there are some pretty bad things going on at the moment; that thing on TV last night was pretty strange; etc.

It just doesn't seem to make any sense at all when you really think about it! I can just about deal with 'pretty good', which seems to add a certain extra favourability to the 'good' bit - but 'pretty bad', 'pretty stupid', 'pretty awful', etc - how can a word which seems to be used as making a term more, not less attractive, be used in a negative sense?

Any ideas?

[Quizmonster]

The earliest recorded use of pretty as an adverb dates back to 1565 in a quote which referred to someone as "a pretty hardy fellow". Consequently, one can scarcely refer to it in terms of having "arrived at" it as if it were something new! Used as an adjective it's only about a century older.