Fierce
Very, extremely - the bleached intensifier sense. 'Fierce cold today', 'he's fierce stubborn'. Sits in the wider Hiberno-English intensifier set with quare, powerful, wild, and desperate. The standard English meaning of savage still works; the intensifier is the Irish contribution.
Etymology
From Anglo-Norman 'fers' and 'fiers' (proud, savage), from Latin 'ferus' (wild). The savage sense has been live in English since the 13th century. The shift to a bleached intensifier - 'very, extremely' - is a regional development that took hold in Hiberno-English and parts of Scottish English while standard southern English continued to associate the word with violence. In Hiberno-English the intensifier use serves as both adverb ('fierce cold today') and predicative adjective ('she's fierce stubborn').
In a sentence
She's fierce handy with that sewing machine. - a domestic compliment
Fierce nice of you to drop in - sit down, sit down. - a welcome
Historical notes
The intensifier 'fierce' is in many ways the Munster equivalent of Ulster's 'wild'. Both erode an original meaning of violence into a generic amplifier; both pair with positive and negative adjectives without surface contradiction ('fierce nice', 'fierce stupid'). Patrick MacGill's Donegal novels use the intensifier construction freely from the early 20th century. In contemporary Hiberno-English the word is a spoken-register marker: common in conversation, rare in formal writing.
Sources
- Oxford English Dictionary, entry fierce adj. (regional intensifying sense). · dictionary
- Hickey, Raymond. Irish English: History and Present-Day Forms. Cambridge University Press, 2007. · academic
- Dolan, Terence Patrick. A Dictionary of Hiberno-English. Gill Books. · dictionary