Why doesn't "completely" work in the sentence "My first choice is completely Oxford"?

My student said "My first choice is completely Oxford" but I corrected it by changing the word "completely" to something else such as "absolutely".

I said that it would be more natural, but I'm not sure how to explain why I made that correction in detail.

Can someone please help me explain it better? Thank you!

Solution 1:

Could your first choice be partially Oxford? If no, then it cannot be completely Oxford either.

I would understand the sentence "My first choice is completely Oxford" as "My first choice for this job hire is a very Oxford person, totally and completely Oxford through and through. He/she is a died-in-the-wool Oxford grad."

If you are trying to say "My first choice of universities I want to attend is Oxford" it should be "My first choice is absolutely Oxford."

Solution 2:

Japanese people have some verbs whose English equivalents are close to completely or absolutely, with some middle ground. However, "completely" is not the accurate description because "completely" describes a state that can be quantified (and "completely" might describe "totally" or "100%"), whereas "absolutely" is a black-or-white term that is a state of totality or not at all. You might want to emphasize that the meaning of "absolutely" leans towards the feeling of "certainly" and away from "completely".

As a side note, "totally" is a colloquialism that for some reason we use, though it's probably not correct for the same reasons despite our usage of it in a similar fashion.

Now I'm curious what his sentence would be in Japanese...

Solution 3:

"Completely" generally means that something is maximal on a scale - which is probably why your student assumed it would be appropriate - but usually precedes an adjective rather than a noun (completely full, completely straight, completely dry). Some adjectives don't correspond to scales with clear endpoints, which is why "completely tall", "completely wide", etc. sound a bit off. Search for "the completely test" to find some interesting linguistic commentary on this subject.