Good adjectives gone bland

Philip listened to her stories with rapt attention. “That was interesting,” he’d say (and Rebecca was thinking that on their second date, which she was already taking as a given, she’d gift him with a thesaurus as a well-meant tease).

Dexter Palmer, Version Control

In Dexter Palmer’s novel, Philip is a brainy, socially awkward scientist who, however complex his work may be, simplifies his conversation through the use of a single adjective, good for all occasions: interesting. It grates on Rebecca, but she marries him anyway.

In truth, many of us are like that. We tend to overwork a single adjective until it becomes meaningless. Lately I’ve noticed restaurant servers, store clerks and others using the word perfect as their standard response to everything. I fail to see how an order for a meatball sub can be perfect, or any more perfect than an order for a grilled cheese sandwich.

This reminds me of when we were on a cruise ship , and at dinner there would be just three or four entree choices. Around a table of eight people or so, each entree would be selected by someone. Yet to each order the well-mannered waiter would say, “Excellent choice.” That might have been flattering at a table for two, but under the circumstances it seemed blatantly phony. Any adjective, even when it is accurate and sincerely used, loses meaning when it is overused.

When someone asks you how you are, how do you reply? Most of us say “Fine” or some other standard, one-word response. We all know it means nothing, but it does help get the conversation started.

Ernest Hemingway used relatively few adjectives in his work, but you may notice that the word nice, among the blandest of adjectives, shows up frequently in some of his books. I've seen it argued that this overworked word actually shows Hemingway’s skill as a writer, but it seems just as likely that he, like the character Philip in Dexter Palmer’s novel, simply didn’t want to hunt for the most appropriate adjective, so just used an all-purpose word so he could move on to the verbs and nouns that interested him.

My own overworked adjectives seem to be wonderful and very good. Two weeks ago my wife called me on saying “very good” in a conversation with a medical provider about why my insurance company hadn’t paid anything toward a hospital bill. It seemed that at the end of a year in which I had faced a mountain of medical bills, I still hadn’t met my deductible for the year. Very good? Obviously meaningless.