Is there a single adverb for "surprisingly stupid"?
I feel like there must be a word that encompasses the phrase "surprisingly stupid" completely. Obviously here, any synonym of "stupid" can replace it.
Example: "The ideal user range of this 'ergonomic' design is surprisingly stupidly narrow."
Here I'm trying to express not that the level of stupidity is surprising, but the presence of it being surprising.
Is there an elegant adverb for this?
Solution 1:
I went and looked at synonyms for stupid at thesaurus.com, hoping to find one that also conveyed surprise to me. The best option, was ludicrous:
causing laughter because of absurdity; provoking or deserving derision; ridiculous; laughable
That definition doesn't really fit with "surprising". But I thought it was also worth looking, based on that definition, at absurd:
utterly or obviously senseless, illogical, or untrue; contrary to all reason or common sense; laughably foolish or false
You could easily use either "ludicrously" or "absurdly" in your example sentence:
The ideal user range of this design is ludicrously narrow.
To me, they both convey some element of surprise, in that I interpret them to mean extremely stupid. "Ridiculously" would do the same. They may not provide the level of "surprise" you are looking for though.
Solution 2:
Stupefyingly:
- Making one unable to think or feel properly.
‘the game ends with a sense of stupefying boredom’1.1 Astonishing and shocking.
‘stupefying financial incompetence’
In particular the 1.1 definition entails the "surprising" quality you're looking for.
Pedantically, stupefying implies that it makes you (the observer) stupid, rather than whoever created the thing.
But there is a lot of leeway here as we're dealing with exaggerative language. Colloquially, it is often used to mean "with surprising stupidity", in the sense that it was so obviously stupid that I couldn't comprehend how they hadn't yet realized how stupid it is.
I'm trying to express not that the level of stupidity is surprising, but the presence of it being surprising.
This fits with the colloquial usage of stupefying.
Also note that the etymology reveals a similar intention:
from Latin stupefaciō (“strike dumb, stun with amazement, stupefy”), from stupeō (“I am stunned, speechless”)