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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

And as I understand it, Brits are particularly fond of using "quite" in a sarcastic fashion, so "quite difficult" in England might mean "not difficult at all, you sodding idiot" or something along those lines.

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Brit here, this isn't something I'm familiar with. "Quite" usually means "somewhat" as in "I found the test quite hard". In upper class speech it can mean "very" as in "that was quite the challenge" or "agreed" when said on its own as a response to a statement.

Interesting. Maybe it's a regional thing, or a generational thing. Or maybe I'm just flat out mis-remembering. Or maybe some of my British friends told me that, but they were just taking the piss. :-)

It's something I've come across references to more than a few times over the years though.

EDIT:

OK, FWIW, I can't find any solid reference at a quick glance to the form I was thinking of, but Google's "AI Search" GenAI thing does reflect what I was getting at, so I don't think it's completely something I made up. Unless me and the Google AI both hallucinated the same thing.

Here's what Google has to say:

    In British English, when someone says "quite" with a 
    slightly sarcastic tone, it usually means they are 
    implying something is "not at all" or "very much the 
    opposite" of what they are describing, essentially 
    downplaying a positive quality to express mild 
    disapproval or skepticism. 

    Example:

    "Oh, that new restaurant was quite good." (Meaning: it 
    was actually pretty bad)
    "He's quite the brilliant mind." (Meaning: he's not very 
    intelligent at all)

I probably did overstate the degree of emphasis of this though.

Regardless, your point is valid. Adding a valueless word like “quite” does not improve clarity or meaning and can only have a negative impact. Not worth the risk.

> when someone says "quite" with a slightly sarcastic tone

The sarcastic tone is the secret sauce which makes the difference with a lot of words, including qualifiers like "quite". Try applying a sarcastic tone to "definitely" in the Earth is "definitely" flat and you'll see how people react.

Teacher: "There's plenty of languages where two negatives will negate each other and create a positive, but no languages where two positives will make a negative."

Student, sarcastic tone: "Yeah, right."

(I have no idea where I got this from, read it online ages ago)

A member of the British upper crust can correct me if I'm off the mark, but the definition there is of a really existing usage, and then the example doesn't match it at all. Did you make the example up yourself, by any chance?

There is, in ordinary people's language, "yeah, it was quite good", when talking about a movie or something, which could easily mean, it was moderately ok, not amazing in any way. It'll depend entirely on tone, you could say it in a chirpy tone and you'd mean that it was actually pretty good. This is the most common usage, and familiar to our brothers and sisters and non-binary-siblings across the pond, I suppose.

And then there's your mathematics teacher saying, "Oh, this lemma really is quite trivial", meaning it's very, very trivial, or a "quite difficult proof", meaning you've to drag yourself across hot coals for hours before it hits you.

Then there is also the meaning you describe above! E.g., a bunch of aristocrats are having dinner, and the candelabra suddenly breaks loose, flies through the air, and smashes into a thousand pieces with a crash. Luckily, no one is hurt.

Everyone looks around, shocked, there's a few shrieks of course, and then one of them says: "Oh, what a smashing evening!" and the other says, in a bored drawl, "Quite". It's like an additional layer of being removed from and above the mere idea that the original thing could have been worthy of a positive comment (in this case, the dinner).

> And as I understand it, Brits are particularly fond of using "quite" in a sarcastic fashion,

Brit here. Many of us are fond of using _any_ word/phrase with sarcasm, irony, or both.

> so "quite difficult" in England might mean "not difficult at all, you sodding idiot"

Depending on tone and other context "quite" can mean anything from a little to a huge amount. It can also mean exactly, as in "Well, quite.".

This is why you need to be careful in professional and academic contexts, or anywhere in writing for that matter, and use domain specific terminology as much as possible.

It may have been Jimmy Carr who pointed out that:

Americans think that Brits can be quite patronizing ("pæ-trə-naɪ-zɪŋ").

Actually it's patronizing ("peɪ-trə-naɪ-zɪŋ").

This is another thing that is captured in tone more than anything though the Brits do have a well deserved reputation for sarcasm. Difficult to convey in print what meaning you want the recipient to get.

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