The Descent of the English Adjective
Jacob Akey
Imagine a grammar where all descriptors and adjectives had been eliminated, except for good and bad. When confronted with a corrupt politician, the users of this grammar would only be able to utter a monosyllable: “bad.” The only compliment the chef would receive for a hearty soup is “good.” Film reviews would be reduced to mere plot summaries, followed by a three- or four-letter verdict. This black-and-white, dualistic lexicon would not only inhibit communication; it would flatten and bifurcate the minds of its users.
Such an elimination of adjectives has already happened to users of modern English grammar, if not through reduction of words, then through reduction of knowledge. Instead of eliminating adjectives, users have stripped adjectives of their meaning. The problem is not one of quantity; the English language lays claim to more words than any other. Rather, many adjectives are becoming synonyms or degrees of good and bad. A mere shift in usage would not be worrying. No one mourns the loss of puissant, and no one needs clue, the ball of yarn. However, the synonymizing of adjectives ought to engender more concern than shifts or gradual obsolescence, for it has the effect of the initial thought experiment by other means. The politician might be alleged awful and the soup sublime, but those words just mean bad and good. The mind is still flattened and bifurcated. Communication is still inhibited.
Worse than good is bad. The dualistic reduction of words with negative connotations is remarkable in that the words have not merely become synonyms for bad; they have lost their original meanings. For example, dreadful, awful, and terrible.
Dreadful has suffered mightily. The word is now merely part of the hyperbolized argot of the effete: “Aren’t those drapes just dreadful!” Or “The divorce, now this, isn’t it all so dreadful?” But, while these are specific uses of the word, they are not correct uses of the word. C.S. Lewis defined dreadful (correctly) not as the state of London weather but as the fear of the uncanny. The dreadful is entwined with the numinous— the feeling one gets when in the presence of the spiritual. “He found the funeral Mass dreadful” is a specific and correct usage.
Awful, too, has been deformed beyond recognition. What is awful inspires awe, but awful is used instead to describe things that are very bad with a certain melodrama. “Her speech was boring, just all around awful” is incorrect. “The awful peal of thunder” is correct.
Terrible, a synonym for awful in both its true and degraded states, has been similarly reduced to describe a thing of poor quality. Correctly used, “lions are terrible beasts.” Incorrectly used, “The roads here are terrible.”
The scale of these losses becomes clear when held against the Biblical. When Jacob dreamt of Heaven, he called the place dreadful. Can one imagine that he meant the house of God was bad? No more than the Psalmist meant God was bad when he labeled Him terrible. Moreover, how many today would be able to read the following composite statement as one of praise? “One should approach the awful with fear and trembling.” Very few. The vulgar, the popular, have been stripped of the language that is their birthright. Wrote Lewis, “We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
Many more adjectives have been reduced to degrees of goodness. Among their numbers are great, amazing, phenomenal, extraordinary, excellent, exceptional, marvelous, and awesome. Certainly, some of these words retain shades of difference, but all could be (and, in fact, are) used to describe a well-made blouse. The words are interchangeable and thus indefinable. They have been lost to the dualism spreading, metastasizing through the English.
While this essay considers the adjective, the sad case of despise deserves mention, as the verb is very near total castration. Arnold Lunn, writing on the Catholics of Great Britain in The Atlantic, 1944, said, “The Church provoked less hostility because in enlightened circles her days were believed to be numbered. You do not hate what you despise.” If only that were true! Nowadays, to despise means to hate deeply, and English and her speakers are poorer for it.
George Orwell wrote, in 1984, that “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.” Perhaps destruction can be beautiful, with flames, crashes, or the pop of a bubble snapping out of existence, but the slow descent of adjectives resembles more decay than destruction.
Why has this happened? If you accept the thesis that the English adjective is suffering a descent into the featureless camps of good and bad, then what forces have precipitated this descent? There is probably not a conspiracy. Rather, ease and fear might be blamed. Someone who says “the soup is sublime” (using sublime as a degree of good) appears to have more fully considered the qualities of the soup than someone who declares it “good” alone. Finer degrees appear more accurate. One might say that “the man is tall” or that “he is 6 foot 3 inches.”Perhaps he only stands at 6’, but 6’3’’ will, in the moment of conversation, seem more precise, more correct than the unspecific, but correct, “tall.” Specificity, even misused, is an easy shortcut. Perhaps more detrimental to the adjective is the fear writers harbor of being misunderstood.
Most writers fear being misunderstood; it is why the adverb exists (“the bar was loud” vs. “really loud”). This fear is also why writers constrain their vocabulary to what they believe their audience to be comfortable with. They will not use adjectives that they believe would hurt the message or the intention of their product. Only for a niche audience will a writer describe the funeral Mass as dreadful.
Thus, the bifurcation of language has been initiated by miseducation and reinforced by cowardice. The result is what English philosopher Francis Bacon would call the spreading of idols of the forum. This is when “a poor and unskillful code of words incredibly obstructs the understanding.” Later, “words are mostly bestowed to suit the capacity of the common man, and they dissect things along the lines most obvious to the common understanding. And when a sharper understanding, or more careful observation, attempts to draw those lines more in accordance with nature, words resist.” Bacon was referring to the work of natural philosophy, but the idols of the forum can do harm elsewhere.
The dualistic use of adjectives serves as one such idol, and the harm done is forming English speakers who can only think in absolute moral terms. It might not seem like the modern world is overburdened by moral absolutism, but are not half measures about respecting everyone’s beliefs the natural position of someone who, when they do take a stand, cannot but take an extreme one? Look at politics. “Our guy is good. Your guy is bad.” If someone’s thought truly is so bigoted, is it any wonder that he or she would not want to make a statement on something as delicate as religion or morals? A bulldozer ought to be cautious among the pews, but better than caution is a more appropriate tool.
Bishop Robert Barron speaks of the mastery of the English language as a matter of liberation. Someone who has mastered the language is a “free speaker” of the language. Someone who is deprived of adjectives other than good, bad, and synonyms is not a master of English. They are not free, and their opinions will necessarily be those of the helot. Cowardly. Wrote Orwell, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
If the problem is adjective-driven cowardice, the solution is bravery in the use of adjectives so that a repair of language can repair thought. Writers can tear down the idols of the forum if only they can overcome their fear of alienating their readers— readers for whom being tested by dreadfuls and stupendouses will be meliorating. Just as the athlete becomes stronger by lifting progressively heavier weights, so might the English speaker become freer by being exposed to ever-better language.
Jacob Akey is a senior international relations and economics double major, with a minor in humanities. He is the Opinion section editor of The Saint Anselm Crier, a writing assistant at the Academic Resource Center, a student ambassador, and the inaugural Grappone Fellow. After graduation, Jacob will serve as a junior fellow for FIRST THINGS, a New York-based magazine of religion and public life.