Outrageous! We need to calm down
Pope Francis has declared war on adjectives. In a speech to his Vatican communications team, he urged them to communicate with reality, without sweetening the message with adjectives or adverbs. Use nouns, he said. They have weight. He urged them to abjure adjectives because he is, he said, allergic to them. And in saying that, he fell into the very trap he wanted his communications team to avoid.
Of course the Pope is not literally allergic to adjectives. His eyes don’t turn pink and his airways don’t constrict when someone says ‘isn’t it a gorgeous day?’. He was using hyperbole — exaggeration as a rhetorical device to make his point. Far, far worse than using adjectives.
But I applaud him for trying to get journalists and writers and press corps back into the realm of calm and dispassionate debate. I’m pretty sure that everyone in the media could be accused of over-egging the omelette in their stories.
Because we live in a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week news cycle, stories have to stand out and grab the readers or the listeners or the viewers attention. Using strong adjectives and hyperbole helps the media do that.
I’m sure you can think of numerous examples. What used to be a bit of rain and wind is now a “weather bomb”. We have “climate emergencies”, instead of a need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. People are always described as being “outraged” when, in reality, they’re probably just a bit brassed off. Criticism is “searing”; research is “groundbreaking”; revelations are “shocking” — you know what I mean.
It’s no longer enough for journalists and
HWhat’s your view? letters@hos.co.nz broadcasters to tell the story. They (we) have to tart it up and make it punchy and attention grabbing so it will stand out from all the other information that’s bombarding us every second, every minute, every hour of the day. We get louder and louder, more and more histrionic and in the end, giving 100 per cent isn’t enough. It has to be 1000 per cent, or 10,000 per cent and in this everescalating war of words, we end up heading towards mutually assured destruction where nobody believes