My question is about adverb aspect of 'hard' [closed]

Question

Is it okay to say:

• the driver was driving hard because the weather was dark.

Or

do we say:

• the weather was hard dark so the driver couldn't see a thing.

Answer 1

In He was driving hard , hard means "furiously" or "intensely" - in the context of driving, probably "fast": I'm guessing that that is not what you mean.

It is quite a different meaning from driving was hard, or it was hard to drive, where "hard" means "difficult".

Hard dark has no sensible meaning.

As others have said, we would not refer to the weather as "dark" unless possible referring to heavy stormclouds. Even then it's not a common expression.

Answer 2

The darkness of night is not weather. You could say, "The driving was hard because it was so dark.

Answer 3

None of them.

I am not sure what "dark weather" means, so perhaps the words above should finish differently:

• the driver was driving carefully because the weather was bad.
• the driving was hard (i.e. difficult) because the weather was poor.
• the driver was careful because the weather was inclement.

Using "hard dark" is wrong. Could use "very dark" or "as dark as night".

Thinking of uses of "hard" gives phrases such as:

• driving was hard work because of the weather
• I had a hard time driving because of the weather

Answer 4

First example:

Hard when used as an adverb like this means "done with maximum force or intensity" - but not with precision.

So driving hard would mean you have your foot on the pedal and are accelerating the car as much as you can, and maybe not being very careful. You won't be doing this because it's dark, but you might if you were a criminal being chased by a police officer, for example, or you might "drive hard" to get a truck that's stuck in snow out.

Hard does mean "difficult" but only as an adjective or subject complement, so you can reword the sentence this way:

Driving was hard for the driver because the weather was dark.

Second example:

Looks like you're trying use hard as a stronger version of very, but it doesn't work. You can say, for example, "I am very pleased" but not "I am hard pleased".

Hard is sometimes used to modify an adjective to mean "definitely and completely" in certain contexts - for example, you might tell a telecom company that a circuit is hard down to mean absolutely no communication is happening. It's not used to talk about weather.

You can use so X that Y though:

the weather was so dark that the driver couldn't see a thing.