Usage: “I’m bare tired from all this Sats revision”; “Paul’s got bare textbooks”
Understatement is not a valid currency in Yoofland. Whereas subtlety and nuance become appreciated like a fine wine the older a person gets, in the playground if something is worth saying, it’s worth saying brashly and with as much emphasis as possible. And so we get unnecessary prefixes bolted on to every mundanity, underlining the lack of gravity in every situation. While “well” was once the leader, as in “that test was well hard”, the London-born “bare” now rules over all. Because when not much has happened in your life yet, everything seems really, really, really important.
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