Kill that adjective!

HYPERBOLE FREQUENTS the pages of our newspapers – as well as the radio and television – with boring regularity. It often emanates from the mouths of politicians. As an editor, I was always on the alert to shoot it down the way Mark Twain once suggested: “The adjective,” he said, “is the enemy of the noun, thoughit agrees with it in number and gender. When you catch an adjective, kill it.”The same can be said of the adverb. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting that you banish every adjective and adverb from your speech or writing. They have their functions. My point is that far too often adjectives and adverbs appear in sentences merely to “big-up” nouns and verbs that ought to be pulling their own weight. And that applies to any word. If, on my revision, it cannotjustify its presence in my sentence, I kick it out. Unceremoniously. And it is quite easy to spot these instances. Like the compliment from the Minister of Sport a few weeks ago welcoming Barbadian athletes home after the Carifta Games in the Cayman Islands. He thought their performance was “phenomenal”. To be fair to him, he used the word in the “per capita” comparison of Barbados with its population of 277 000 and the much larger Jamaica. That notwithstanding, I thought Mr Lashley went overboard. President of the Amateur Athletic Association Esther Maynard was more measured:she used the word “outstanding”. Keen observers thought Barbados’ performance average.Without doubt, words are the most exciting construct of human existence. They separate us from the other animals, although I would be reluctant to stick my neck out and argue that animals don’t have their own languages. It might simply be that we don’t know theirs and they don’t know ours.This newspaper pays me a “thral-yuh” every timeI write 650 words. I frankly think I deserve more and will shortly be making a pitch for a raise. Only if the editors knew the time and effort I – and I’m sure my other columnist colleagues – put into this exercise every two weeks. But that’s another issue.We human beings are what Steven Pinker inThe Stuff Of Thought describes as “verbivores” –“a species that lives on words, and the meaning and use of language are bound to be among the major things we ponder, share and dispute”. I doubt very much if this newspaper would accepta column with paragraphs like this: “Discovery nook hidden a surreal Hillaby formula pollution in fabrication endless space dreams lay-offs quota through billion salt recurring bullying.”On receipt of such an emailed essay, Carol Martindale’s first action might be to call up someone from the Nation’s IT Department to check her computer. If all is well with her machine, her next move might be to get in touch with my wife to ascertain if she has noticed anything unusual in my behaviour recently.Unless you can order words to reflect meaning, emotions and a host of other aspects of human behaviour you’re wasting time.I enjoy the discipline of searching for the most effective words to get across my position to the reader.I don’t always succeed. A column is rewritten sometimes half a dozen times. I go through several headline changes and am pleased on Sunday mornings when my choice meets the approval of the Editor and her sub-editors to the extent that they leave it alone. Only twice in 57 columns have they changed my headline, and I agreed with them on both occasions. But the word in the sentence that excites me most is the verb. The verb is the engine of the sentence. All the energy emanates from the verb. If you can hit on the appropriate shade of meaning, your verbs and your nouns don’tneed any suspenders.I would love to go on but my 650-word quota is up.  Carl Moore was the first Editor of THE NATION and is a social commentator. Email: [email protected]