We talked a bit about tall and the fact that it really seems to mean something like “tall as compared to other things of the same sort.” And it came up that even something like red is probably relative too (cf. red hair vs. red paint).

But for the purposes of the homework, you can treat boring as being absolute. If you treat it as relative, then it has to be relative to something that isn’t in the sentence (for a sentence like Bond is boring), which is a complication I didn’t intend for you to have to deal with.

That is, if boring is really “boring relative to the comparison set”, then we would have to assume that Bond is boring really means something like “Bond is (a person and) boring (for a person)”—we’d have to assume that there’s some kind of hidden abstract noun there, rather like the one in the poor (which we would take to mean “the poor (people)”). It can be done, but it was not what I was intending for you to have to do when I wrote up the homework.