Something has gone wrong with the use of quite. Someone wrote in the Telegraph: ‘Beating Brazil at a World Cup? Quite the experience.’ Then I heard: ‘It’s been quite the dreich day.’
The annoying part is the the. An idiom does exist with quite the, but the meaning is different. If my husband displayed his portly figure in a snug piece of fashion, I might be tempted to say: ‘You’re quite the Beau Brummell this evening.’ But if the afternoon is sunny, then it’s ‘quite a sunny afternoon’.
Quite, as an adverb, possesses two main contrasting senses: ‘completely’ or ‘comparatively’. Quite exhausted could mean ‘utterly exhausted’ or ‘fairly exhausted’. The meaning ‘completely’ came from Anglo-Norman terms such as quit (‘acquitted, cleared’), itself from Latin quietus. (When Shakespeare makes Hamlet say ‘He himself might his quietus make/ With a bare bodkin’, he is referring to death metaphorically, as clearing an account, borrowing from the formula for discharging a debt, quietus est.
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