Nuanced Intensifiers

The English language has many wonderful intensifiers. This gives the able speaker or writer the ability to be acutely specific. This is why the word very is so dreaded—it has no flavor. Just like flavors, though, intensifiers can taste bad if combined improperly.
A word that comes to mind is highly. Highly is frequently substituted for a simpler adjective to give some loftiness (figuratively speaking, that is) to another adjective. “Highly intelligent” is perhaps the most common and clichéd, but at least it makes sense. Examples of less logical uses abound. For instance, one hears of “highly unmotivated students” (especially these days). How about “heavily unmotivated students”? Doesn’t that sound a bit more accurate? Sadly, a Google search retrieves 514 hits for “highly unmotivated,” and only 12 for “heavily unmotivated”.
Another example involves discounts. “Highly discounted” is an especially illogical and unappealing advertisement. Once again, “heavily discounted” rings much truer. Fortunately, businesses have caught on to this one as “heavily discounted” gets 495,000 hits compared to only 191,000 for “highly discounted”.
Here are some other nuanced pairs of intensifiers to consider:

particularly and especially
quite and very
considerably and significantly
severely and tragically