Spooky Scary

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Gold Forest English podcast. As always, my name is Jordan.

Today, I want to talk about some scary vocabulary. Now, I know it's not Halloween. In fact, the day that I'm recording this, spring is getting closer and closer, and the cherry blossoms are blooming here in Japan. So it's a very beautiful day today. However, I want to talk about some scary vocabulary. Maybe if you can learn it now, then it will be ready for later in the year, ready for Halloween. So, I hope it will be helpful.

Specifically, I want to talk about some adjectives that have different levels of intensity (power). And they also have some different nuances (details) about the feeling or the context. So the words that I want to talk about are spooky, creepy, frightening, terrifying, these different adjectives that are all very similar, but have some key differences.

So, let's start at the beginning with spooky. Spooky is a great adjective. It's very useful. It does have this feeling of scary, but in a fun way. It's strange, it's mysterious, playful. It's not really scary, like a fun-scary. For example, Halloween, or a haunted house in a fun park. These things are spooky. Maybe telling spooky stories around a campfire with children. There's the scary atmosphere, but there's no real danger. It's positive, it's fun, it's safe. But it has that idea of scariness. That's the word spooky.

So, because this word is very mild and fun, we don't want to use it to describe things that are genuinely scary. If you felt really scared, using the word "spooky" would be very strange. It would be wrong. People would not understand your true feelings because "spooky" is very soft and playful.

The second word is creepy. Now, creepy means a bit scary—so quite scary—but it has more of a feeling of uncomfortable. We are not comfortable in this situation. We often talk about "a person is creepy" or "a situation is creepy". For example, if you're on the train, and maybe it's the middle of the day so the train is not very busy. In fact, there's lots and lots of empty seats all around the train. You're one of the few people on the train. And then the doors open at the station and a big man gets on the train. And he looks around and there's all these empty seats, and then he comes and sits right next to you. Why is he sitting next to you? There's loads of empty seats, but he's chosen to sit right next to you, very close. This is not normal. You would feel a bit scared, and you would definitely feel uncomfortable. This would be a creepy action. So you're feeling this unsettled, uneasy, uncomfortable feeling, connected with the scary feeling. That's the word "creepy".

Then we've got our standard word: the word scary. Scary is the general word, the default word. It's a very basic, common word to talk about fear. Horror movies are scary. I think spiders are scary. Very basic word. It's almost always good for talking about general fear things.

When we want to do something a bit more than scary, we might use the word frightening. Frightening feels more serious. It's often used in more formal situations. So, news reports, formal writing, business writing might use the word "frightening" because it feels a lot more formal, but it also feels more serious. So there is more genuine danger. It feels much more severe than just "scary".

Then, above the word "frightening" is the word terrifying. This is extremely strong fear. This is very high-level, scared feelings. Terrifying. When you have this feeling, maybe it's difficult to breathe, your body does not move properly, your brain can't think. You've got so much fear and scared feeling that your body stops working properly. For example, being trapped in an elevator. Or if the elevator starts to fall down, you are terrified, you're scared that maybe you're going to die. This would be a terrifying situation in a falling elevator. So this is a very serious fear situation.

This kind of strong word is very useful, but we need to use it for serious, strong situations. Situations that have real danger and real terror, real scared feelings that are very strong. It's very important that we use the right adjectives to talk about the right situation.

If we're using a soft adjective like "spooky" to talk about your experience of falling in an elevator, it would be very unusual, very strange, and people would not know if you were joking or serious, because you're using this soft word to describe a horrible situation. Likewise, if you talk about the haunted house in a carnival as "terrifying", it might feel too strong. "Terrifying" has a lot of danger involved, but a haunted house in a fun fair, in a carnival or amusement park—there's not real danger there. There might be some spooky, scary things and skeletons, but using the word "terrifying" might feel too strong. So it's very important to use the right adjective for the right level.

As always, I've written a blog post about these words and some notes about their use. So if you're interested in this topic, go and check out the blog post on goldforestacademy.com. And I've also made a small graphic on the Instagram account, which is @goldforestacademy. And then you can easily see these different levels of scary.

Well, that's it for today's episode. I hope you are not having a scary week. I hope you're having a very good week, a very relaxing week. So thank you very much for listening. I'll see you in the next episode. Goodbye.