altogether something

Here's a story of curiosity and exploration and enjoying where it took me.I was (orig. AmE) fooling around with a corpus interface (in preparation for teaching students how to use it), and I asked it for adjectives that go after the adverb altogether. I don't know why I chose that word, but I did. And I noticed something: in the British National Corpus (BNC), the word was followed by adjectives that struck me as strange. Things like: altogether happy, altogether lovely, and altogether innocent.Negative and positive?At first, I wondered: does altogether have different semantic prosody in British and American English? Semantic prosody is when a word that could be defined in a neutral way nevertheless tends to occur in contexts that are mostly negative or mostly positive. So, the word ends up having bad or good connotations. I felt like I was used to altogether occurring in more negative contexts. Now, the first thing to do here is to ask: does the fact that happy follows altogether mean…