Words and Stuff
Do you use too many adjectives? I’m sorry if you find such a direct question offensive, and I don’t mean to suggest that overdoing the epithets is quite as wicked as overdoing the salt, or the sugar, or even the alcohol, but there is a school of thought suggesting that, when it comes to adjectives, fewer may be better.
I was reminded of this the other day when I picked up a copy of Herbert Read’s English Prose Style, published in 1928. I knew that Read was the leading champion of modern art in Britain in the middle of the 20th century, and perhaps the pre-eminent authority on painting and sculpture in the years between John Ruskin and Kenneth Clarke. I hadn’t realised, however, that he had been a literary critic before turning to art. English Prose Style shows his erudition, and the severity of his opinions.
Read persuasively counselled against adjectives used only to provide emphasis or imaginary importance. Journalists have long been told (albeit to little avail) to kill the adjective in such pairings as ‘top priority’, ‘major speech’, ‘executive summary’, ‘role model’, ‘track record’, ‘safe haven’, ‘past experience’, ‘empirical research’, ‘free gift’, ‘whole raft’ and ‘live audience’ (imagine a dead one). As Read put it, ‘A loose orotundity leads to the insertion of unnecessary attributes.’ I think he meant that lazy writers like to pump up their prose with clichés, without bothering to ask whether the adjectives are helpful, tautological or redundant.
The general rule, said Read, is to omit all adjectives ‘that may be assumed’ – ie, those embodied in the noun – ‘and to admit only those which … further action, interest or meaning.’ Here he was setting more difficult conditions, as his examples showed. The ‘wrathful sea’ and the ‘silent swell’ were condemned, but ‘good angels’ and ‘great ruin’ were commended since ‘they strike us with a pleasant freshness’.
I’m not convinced by this. Is the sea really always wrathful? Have you not heard the swell slap against the jetty or the side of the boat? Surely all angels are good? And surely ‘ruin’ needs no ‘great’ to strengthen it? Still, I see what Read was getting at when he declared, ‘Meaning is an arrow that reaches its mark when least encumbered with feathers.’
The truth of that comment is borne out in the works of A E Housman. Housman wrote in plain language, simple phrases and a concise style. The 53 poems that make up A Shropshire Lad contain only 62 words of more than two syllables. He was almost as sparing with adjectives. Verse after verse contains no epithet at all. Of the 161 words in The Laws of God, The Laws of Man only seven are adjectives. Shakespeare put more into two lines of Sonnet 129.
Housman’s economy of adjectives was not born of a dislike for them. Quite the opposite: because he liked them, he chose them carefully, and thus to great effect. And though most were short, some, such as in the ‘twelve-winded’ sky and the ‘blue remembered’ hills, were not.
Yet writers aplenty have given pleasure with an exuberance of adjectives. Consider James Melville’s account of the reaction to the sailors of the Spanish Armada cast onto Scottish shores with the Lammas tide of 1588. ‘Terrible was the fear, piercing were the preachings, earnest, zealous, and fervent were the prayers, sounding were the sighs and sobs, and abounding were the tears at that Fast and General Assembly keipit at Edinburgh, when the news was credibly tauld, sometimes of their landing at Dunbar, sometimes at St Andrews, and in Tay, and now and then at Aberdeen and Cromarty Firth.’
My rule for adjectives is use them, but choose well: they must add more than length to your prose.