When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It by Ben Yagoda

In One Fat Englishman, Kingsley Amis's narrator expresses surprise that the cast of characters in a young American's novel does not include 'paraplegic necrophiles, hippoerotic jockeys, exhibitionistic castrates, coprophagic pig farmers, armless flagellationists and the rest of the bunch.' (Hippo-: 'Having to do with horses.' Coprophagic: 'Involving or indulging in the eating of excrement.') S.J. The only good use for that kind of adjective is comedy. the element of the aleatoric may well be genuinely present,' and refers to 'proleptic writers such as Ibsen and Strindberg' and to a 'hieratic figure somewhat reminiscent of Ernst.' That's too proleptic for me. Byrd is justly snickered at for saying things like 'maledicent language' and 'contumelious lip.' Gore Vidal has been accused of excessive fondness for words like 'mephitic' and 'riparian.' In just one essay, the poet James Fenton writes that '. There is no reason to use 'rebarbative' instead of 'unpleasant,' 'annoying,' or some other negative epithet, other than to be fancy. I acknowledge, moreover, that when writers commit the sin of showing off - of being flowery or obscure for no reason other than to call attention to themselves - adjectives are most often the tools of the crime. The words give you the feel of a bunch of football players piling on, long after the play has been whistled dead. Beginning or inept writers are inclined to stack up adjectives in front of a noun (especially when attempting to do justice to nature). So if you point out that the jaw of every male in the room dropped when a woman walked in, it's neither necessary nor helpful to describe her as 'beautiful.' And establishing that someone kicked his opponent when down, stole $17 from a Salvation Army collection kettle, and lied to partners about having sexually transmitted diseases precludes the need to call him terrible, awful, horrible, deplorable, despicable, or vile. Writers frequently pull out the adjectives when they either haven't, or are afraid they haven't, provided sufficient data - specific nouns and active verbs - to get their ideas across. Like adverbs, they are sprinkled into sentences by writers who don't stop to think that the concept is already in the noun.'Īs the French might put it, those quotes have reason.

Thus Voltaire: 'The adjective is the enemy of the noun, though it agrees with it in number and gender.' Thus Twain: 'When you catch an adjective, kill it.' And thus William Zinsser: 'Most adjectives are. That it is good to avoid them is one of the few points on which the sages of writing agree. They rank right up there with Osama bin Laden, Geraldo Rivera, and the customer-service policies of cable-TV companies. As far as not getting respect goes, adjectives leave Rodney Dangerfield in the dust.

When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It by Ben Yagoda