Have non-gradable adjectives ever come to be used as gradable?
Are there examples of non-gradable adjectives that, over time, have come to be used as gradable?
For example, has a word commonly accepted as non-gradable (like binary in "It's a binary choice" [example suggested by @JasonBassford]) ever transitioned to being commonly accepted as measurable in degrees?
An example of what this might look like:
There seem to be competing definitions for anonymization, and therefore anonymized. It seems the non-gradable definition is prevalent, and I wonder if that might change in the future.
One definition asserts that anonymized data is, by definition, irreversibly anonymized:
Anonymization: The act of permanently and completely removing personal identifiers from data, such as converting personally identifiable information into aggregated data... Once this data is stripped of personally identifying elements, those elements can never be re-associated with the data or the underlying individual.
— Educause, emphasis mine
Another definition seems to allow for the possibility of incomplete anonymization:
Anonymization: The process in which individually identifiable data is altered in such a way that it no longer can be related back to a given individual. Among many techniques, there are three primary ways that data is anonymized... Note that all of these processes will not guarantee that data is no longer identifiable and have to be performed in such a way that does not harm the usability of the data.
— IAPP, emphasis mine
Under the former definition, anonymized would seem to be a non-gradable adjective (that is, data is either anonymized or not-anonymized, with no degrees of anonymization in between).
Under the latter definition, anonymized would seem to be a minimum-standard absolute gradable adjective (that is, anonymized data possesses a non-zero degree of anonymization).
Update:
@CWill aptly pointed out that the second definition doesn't necessarily mean anonymized is gradable, because an incomplete anonymization process may not result in data which may be described as anonymized.
However, I've found uses of anonymized which necessitate its measurement in degrees rather than two categories. For example:
A piece of text is under-anonymized if identifying information (such as names and locations) are only partially removed or replaced in a way that the described individuals can still be re-identified in a given document.
— What does it mean to anonymize text?
Are there examples of non-gradable adjectives that, over time, have come to be used as gradable?
Yes. The adjective “infinite”.
Prior to 1891 “infinite” was ungradeable, in that year Georg Cantor’s paper was published which demonstrated that there are infinite Natural numbers but there are more Real numbers. Thus the paper showed that there were sets of infinities whose cardinalities were of different sizes. “Infinite” then became technically gradeable.
Okay, I'll give it a try. How about dead, as deprived of life, no longer alive (M-W)? Commonly accepted as either YES or NO, but we also have almost dead, half dead, etc. The dog is dead; the dog is not dead, the dog is almost dead; the dog is half dead; etc. I must be missing something. And then there's Schrodinger's cat, which is simultaneously dead and not dead. That may not make dead fully gradable, but it does create a grade different from dead and not dead, i.e., both.