Learn English – Smoothing or smoothening (smooth/smoothen)

Sometimes, not only in English but in all languages, we want to emphasize certain situations. And then the language itself gives us devices that aren't always common, but we use them anyways, based on known and meaningful expressions.

I am very hungry

We can depict that the subject has surpassed the status of just "hungry" for they must have stayed a long time without eating. This is a known meaningful expression.

Murder is very illegal

From this, even if it doesn't make much sense in the binary nature of the word "legal", we can depict that "murder" is a crime that, morally or ethically, has surpassed the status of "illegal".

We can state that by looking at another not-so-serious crime:

Parking on the sidewalk is illegal

Yeah, we all know it is illegal and wrong. But it is a petty crime compared to murder. In some countries murder is penalized with life imprisonment, even with death penalty, while parking on the sidewalk gives you a fine and, in the worst of the cases, your car is towed.

We can still say that "Murder is illegal", of course it is, but in the sentence, the "very illegal" was made to emphasize.

These are mostly synonymous, at least when talking about the end of some journey.

My GPS is telling me, "You have reached your destination."

My GPS is telling me, "You have arrived at your destination."

Metaphorically, while "arrive" is often just a description of events, "reach" can imply some sort of effort or unusual extension (related to its other definitions) so it can sound slightly more dramatic.

After a journey of many days, they finally reached the castle.

This is subtle, though. If you really want to imply effort there are more dramatic verbs.

Parched and weary after crossing the desert, they stumbled into the oasis.