Can ‘hardly’ replace ‘rarely’, or must I say ‘hardly ever’ when’most ever’ is not spoken or written?
I wrote the sentence
Fiona goes to the theater once in Blue Moon.
Fiona Avery attends
every movie of the year. Which means she never goes to the theater.
Why do you use hardly rather than rarely when using some verbs in your sentence? resulting in Fiona
hardly goes to the theater.
Or need I use hardly ever? Why does a dictionary not answer
a question like this one?
Yes, for that specific example.
In discrete things like going to the theatre I’d take “ever” as implied or even unnecessary.
With a variable thing like eating hardly and hardly ever are fairly different:
“Hardly eats” vs “Hardly ever eats” => => “doesn’t eat very much” in the first example
of food consumption is small but there’s no comment on frequency and in the second the second there’s a long time between meals but no indication of how large each meal is.
What does it mean if you went to the theatre but not for binary things? Why do we have to go to the theatre if we want to go? As such having a low total amount of visits to the theatre and not visiting very often are the same.
As a native English speaker on Quora, but mostly German, French and Italian,
I find myself having a genuine English flavor which I enjoy.
