"very dead, extremely dead"

Question

As far as I know, dead as an adjective is simply the opposite of alive, or living. Which means that there is no element of level when describing a dead person. And yet I came across this phrases very dead too often when I hear the live game commentaries on Youtube. Plus, as I'm reading a book named A history of everyone who has ever lived, I see these sentences.

In a hole in the ground, a man lay extremely dead. He was either left in this tomb by his family or perished right there, with no idea that he was one of the more important people in millions of years.

What are these two phrases very dead and extremely dead supposed to mean?

It's only hyperbole, commonly heard in just about any type of sports commentary. Perhaps they mean the player was killed in an extravagant fashion, and is now a puddle of mush. — Cascabel_StandWithUkraine_, Mar 31 '20 at 14:58
Start with the title and you already have has ever lived. When a joking phrase is repeated enough, people use it as everyday language and forget the joke behind it. — Yosef Baskin, Mar 31 '20 at 15:08
I'm reminded of the line from The Princess Bride: "He's only mostly dead. There's a difference between mostly dead and completely dead." — RobJarvis, Mar 31 '20 at 15:44
Or from the Wizard of Oz "And she's not only merely dead, she's really most sincerely dead". — John Lawler, Mar 31 '20 at 18:14
Does this answer your question? Are the rules regarding absolute modifiers too absolute?. Absolute etc adjectives, logically ungradeable, are sometimes quirkily 'graded'. This non-standard usage is for emphasis and punch; 'he was extremely dead' is tongue-in-cheek for 'he was very obviously dead'. — Edwin Ashworth, Mar 31 '20 at 18:56

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 01 '20 at 13:23

"very dead" can mean dead for a long time. It is similar to "very pregnant". Being pregnant or dead can be seen as binary states, either you are or you aren't. However, a woman who is eight months pregnant seems more pregnant than a woman who is one month pregnant. Similarly, someone who has just died peacefully in their sleep wouldn't be described as "very dead", but someone who has been dead for a long time could be (cold, desiccated, disfigured, etc.).

In the context of computer games, being shot by an arrow might make your character dead, being hit by a nuclear blast might make your character very dead, i.e. there was a small chance the character might have survived the arrow but no chance the character could have survived a nuclear blast.

So "very dead" can mean "dead for a long time" or "violently dead".

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 31 '20 at 16:26

So, these are, for sure, technical terms or slang terms (depending on your perspective).

A little history lesson... most of the games these days which have people running around shooting other things (either with plasma weapons, regular weapons, or bows and arrows) use a mechanism to track a character's health, and almost always the term for this inside the game engine is: Hit Points.

Now, that term should be very familiar to any who play Paper and Pencil Roleplaying Games and it is, indeed, the exact same mechanic. It's just an abstract number that represents one's remaining "life".

So, with that history lesson in place:

What does very dead and extremely dead mean?

It means that the target suffered so much damage that they exceeded their damage potential by a significantly wide margin (i.e. if they had 10 health, they're now at -20... they're very dead.)

By way of example (a very old example), in the game Quake, a character suffering from massive damage would be "Gibbed"... I shall not explain what means, you may look that up. That term has been replaced with "Very Dead" and "Extremely Dead" as most games do not have specific mechanics for this scenario.

https://quakewiki.org/wiki/Gib

"... bringing an entity's health below a certain threshold, for example -40 for a player, or..."

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 31 '20 at 16:31

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Of course dead is dead. Sometimes we put words before it —very, extremely, awfully—for emphasis and to add color.

You'll hear things like very much alive and so alive. We describe how alive people are, so it's natural to want to describe how dead they are, too.

answered Mar 31 '20 at 16:31

Charlie Bernstein

981

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Dead and alive are non-gradable adjectives (when they describe absolute qualities). You can't be a bit dead or very dead. To make them stronger we have to use modifiers like absolutely, totally or completely. I'm pretty sure so alive and very much alive do not describe absolute qualities, rather, they are used to describe something that's exuberant. Furthermore, in the screenshot you've provided, still dead implies that GF Franco is still boring, unexciting, uninspiring or uninteresting. OP's question is about absolute qualities ('a man lay extremely dead'). – Decapitated Soul Mar 31 '20 at 16:52

"very dead, extremely dead"

3 Answers3