fairly

Hello everyone,

I was told that "fairly" cannot be used with verbs, but I have found a lot of sentences like

He fairly snarled at her.
It fairly destroyed the machine.

Can "fairly" be replaced with "quite" or "rather" here?


Thank you.

Yes, it does occur with verbs, but this is very colloquial and I would also say it was non-standard*; also, the meaning seems to be different. In your examples, it emphasizes the verbs, if anything. It doesn't mean the same as the standard modifier 'fairly' which means "rather; to a moderately high degree". For that meaning you need 'fairly much':

We've fairly much finished. [Perhaps not 100%, but we've finished the important parts]

'Quite' of course has two meanings, "rather, fairly" and "completely". In your examples, 'quite' is not really idiomatic in the first, and could be used in the second, with the meaning "completely". In effect, this has the same meaning as the colloquial 'fairly' here. It's not "almost, mostly, to a moderate degree", but rather it emphasizes the destruction. Another example would be:

It (the news) quite/fairly astonished me.

It might also be restricted in verbs: snapping, destroying, and astonishing are absolute; you can't really do them to a moderate degree. (If you snap or astonish moderately, the strong words 'snap' and 'astonish' are the wrong choice of word for it.)

* But the example below, 'the hall fairly rang with applause', sound more standard to me, so I'm not sure.

From what I gather, I'd say the second use means absolutely, as in :

3. (not used with a negative) positively; absolutely the hall fairly rang with applause

(Free Dictionary)
and I'd also say that the first one means clearly / distinctly - sense 2 from the same source. But I'd like some well-intended native speaker to check this point.

"Positively" was the synonym that came to my mind, but "absolutely" works well, too.

And from our very own WR Dictionary:

/ˈfeəli/
▶adverb
1 with justice.
2 moderately.
3 used for emphasis: he fairly snarled at her.

We've been talking about sense 3 of course.

Thank you all.