Please Don't Murder the Modifiers

Please, Don’t Murder the Modifiers





“If you catch an adjective, kill it,” Mark Twain wrote.  Sound advice, perhaps, for people who write newspaper columns, limericks, or fortune cookies, but what about the rest of the working world?  If we whacked all the adjectives and sent them to sleep with the fishes, several lucrative industries would go belly up.



First example–advertising, a gazillion dollar business.  Imagine choosing a new shampoo based on a list of ingredients.  (“This one sounds good...  ‘Head Hair Shampoo -- This product will clean your hair with a combination of sodium chloride and glycol distearate mixed with secretions of rodent glands. Wow! I’ll take two!”) 



As consumers, we don’t want to take time away from our families and many beloved electronic devices in order to read boring lists of possibly deadly, consonant-laden ingredients.  We want to know what the product will do for our hair and whether our sex lives will immediately improve if we use it.  Will the herbal ingredients infuse each strand with a brilliant shine, caress our tresses with soothing botanicals, or frizz up our 'do like a cockapoo with its tail in a light socket?  It would be tough to find the answers to those questions if all we read on the label was, “Our shampoo will clean the dirt out of your hair and leave it . . . cleaner.  Buy it and see if you can finally snag yourself a date or hit the Powerball.”



While adjectives help us to visualize results we might gain from buying and using many  products, well-chosen modifiers actually keep the wine-making business afloat. Without adjectives, professional wine-tasters would lose their jobs and be reduced to hanging out on park benches, chugging wine from tattered boxes and whining to themselves in badly accented French.



Imagine this typical scene at “Tres Expensive Winery,” where the head wine taster is introducing the latest vat of Chardonnay to the local press:

Journalist: “How do you find the wine, M.Poupon?”

Wine taster: “Superb! It was full-bodied yet delicate, forceful yet subtle, seductive and smooth while retaining a delicious hint of amiable boldness.”



Without adjectives, the same scene would replay like this:

Journalist: “So, how was the wine, M. Derriere?”

Wine-taster: “Ah, it was wine.  It had a taste.  I tasted it and liked it.  If everyone else tastes it, too, I am convinced they will like it, also.”



Adjectives are vastly important to another huge industry–the cosmetic business.  All major cosmetic houses employ house “noses.”  Worth their weight in gold, Noses have a keen sense of smell and literally sniff out the individual notes (scents) used to develop perfumes.  When “Ms. Olfactory” relays her findings to the staff perfumer, she must be precise: “The top note is laden with a heady blend of spicy jasmine and tart lime, drying down to the exquisite middle notes of piquant lavender combined with sweet young rosebuds that perfectly compliment the bottom notes of zesty orange blossoms and dusky magnolia.”



The modifier-free version would not only be boring, but incredibly frustrating to the perfumer

Perfumer: “What do you think of my creation, Madame Odour?” 

Nose: “I think it smells, sir.  I enjoy all of the smells separately, but when they are blended, Mon Dieux!  Do they ever smell!”



Someone once wrote, “A perfectly chosen adjective is to a sentence what an impeccable wine is to a meal–-a complementary and delightful addition.”  Actually, I just made that up in the shower while I shampooed my hair with frothy mounds of freesia essence, followed by a generous splash of a spicy, intoxicating vanilla body spray.  Half a glass of a subtle,nutty Chardonnay later I’m feeling sublimely relaxed.  Mark Twain, be danged.