In reply to fred99:
> In between there are; Mild Severe, Severe, and Hard Severe.
> That makes Mild Very Severe FOUR grades harder than Hard Very Difficult.
I'd completely forgotten about Mild Severe, to be honest. In my mind there's just Severe and Hard Severe. The way I always saw the grades was: Mod, Diff, (Hard Diff, maybe, but really the same as Mild V Diff), Mild V Diff, V Diff, Hard V Diff (same as Mild Severe), Severe, Hard Severe, Mild V S , VS, Hard VS [far too narrow, distinctions being made by e.g. 'low' or 'high in grade'], E1, E2, E3, etc, etc (which all work just fine). But there is a certain charm in O G Jones's wonderful old adjectival system ... which is about as nebulous as wine-tasting connoisseurship.