The Fast and the Furious films, a series of car-racing movies, often describe a product called NOS, short for nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide is a fuel that racers use to give more power to their cars.

Racers push the NOS button on the controls, and their cars suddenly go much faster.

Today on Everyday Grammar, we will explore the world of intensifiers -- words that increase the power of other words. You might say intensifiers are like the nitrous oxide of the English language. And just like NOS can be useful in a race, understanding intensifiers can help you when you are reading or listening to something in English.

Let us begin with a few definitions.

Definitions

Intensifiers are words that make adjectives and adverbs stronger.

Let me give you an example. Imagine a person uses the adjective cool to describe a car, as in:

"That car is cool."

That same person might strengthen or enforce the meaning of cool by using an intensifier, as in:

"That car is so cool."

Common English intensifiers are words such as very, really and so. Very is probably the most formal, while the word so is probably the least formal.

The least formal intensifier, so, will be our subject of discussion today.

History

The word so has an unusual history.

The Online Etymology Dictionary notes that so comes from the Old English term swa. The Google Ngrams search engine shows so appearing as far back as the year 1500, the first year in Google's book records.

Google Ngrams - so

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