From my blog today

Geoffrey Pullum at language log has a brace of posts demolishing the advice given by the Reverend Angela Tilby on Radio Four's Thought for the day. She advised that we should take a blue pencil to all our adjectives and cut them out. This is of course a piece of pernicious nonsense that self-appointed guardians of the language keep on repeating.
He does an admirable job of the demolition (in spite of a couple of problems - surely "economic" is also an adjective and though "more" is an adverb "more accountable" has to be treated as if it were "accountabler", a comparitive form of the adjective.)

What he doesn't do is what critics of the similarly pontificating Lynne Truss took great delight in - applying her own rules to her piece.

So let's have a look at some of her sentences with and without the adjectives.

Here's the opening sentence.

Today marks the birth of the Supreme Court which replaces the House of Lords as the highest court in the land, and ensures the total separation of the judiciary from the executive.

Let's ignore "Supreme" as it's part of the fixed expression "Supreme Court". That leaves us with "highest" and "total" to blue pencil.

Today marks the birth of the Supreme Court which replaces the House of Lords as the court in the land, and ensures the separation of the judiciary from the executive.


There's no great problem with losing "total" but now we have a sentence suggesting that there is only one court in the land.

Let's go on, skipping over most of the adjectives in the next paragraph (for the moment) as they are listed for discussion and alighting on this.

Yet when I was at school we were encouraged to be a bit suspicious of adjectives.

Without its adjective this becomes gibberish.

Yet when I was at school we were encouraged to be a bit of adjectives.

But perhaps we should remove the whole adjectival phrase to get

Yet when I was at school we were encouraged to be adjectives.

Well at least it's grammatical but God knows what it means.
Maybe she is thinking only of pre-modifying adjectives. Does she have any of those? Indeed she does, barely a sentence later we see

[Adjectives] are not the important words like verbs: 'being or doing words', or nouns: 'names of persons, places or things'.

or, applying the blue pencil again

[Adjectives] are not the words like verbs: 'being or doing words', or nouns: 'names of persons, places or things'.

Once again the result is rather odd.

The rest of her prose is similarly adjective-heavy, but let's return to the paragraph I skipped over and look to see if her specific objections have any substance. She says that on the Ministry of Justice Website the Strategic Objectives are full of adjectives. Civil and family justice, she says, are described as "efficient" and "effective". Actually no, they aren't. I've checked. What the website says, under "objectives", is

Increased efficiency and effectiveness of the civil, administrative and family justice systems

Both "efficiency" and "effectiveness" are nouns.

What about her claime that 'effective', 'transparent', 'responsive' are applied to criminal justice? Yes, it does say that, right there in the heading

A more effective, transparent and responsive criminal justice system for victims of the public

The trouble is if we remove these adjectives we get

A criminal justice system system for victims of the public

which doesn't mean the same thing at all. It means we will introduce one where it didn't exist before rather than improving the one we have.

On then to 'controlled', 'fair' migration. Sorry, I can't find that in the strategic objectives at all. Let's look at 'cohesive', 'empowered' and 'active' communities. Nope, that's not there either. I'll be generous and assume she's searched the rest of the site rather than just the strategic objectives, something that right now I don't have the time to do. I'll bet that wherever they occur and whether they occur as adjectives - as she claims - or in equivalent noun forms, the meanings of the sentences will be drastically altered by their omission. It would be nice if her examples actually matched the place that they are drawn from, but why ruin a good opinion with dirty, little facts?

In short adjectives are every bit as important as nouns and anyone who tells you otherwise doesn't know what they are talking about.

I suspect that what she meant to say is that we should take a look at our writing and decide whether we are possibly over-using adjectives.

Clearly adjectives are just as important as other parts of speech - and just like other parts of speech that can be misused in various ways. What is not possible is to simply eliminate adjectives (or other parts of speech) just because some people use them badly or excessively.

She should say what she means if she means to write or speak clearly and not leave it up to us to figure out what she means.

For those who don't feel like reading my blog the full text of the Reverend Tilby's remarks can be found here.

quote:

She should say what she means if she means to write or speak clearly and not leave it up to us to figure out what she means.

Not only that...I don't trust anyone who can't quote others accurately. I am surprised that the BBC didn't check the facts.

quote:

Not only that...I don't trust anyone who can't quote others accurately. I am surprised that the BBC didn't check the facts.

"Thought for the day" is a religious monologue, generally delivered live, and is the opinions of the person delivering it. I suspect that the Beeb doesn't do much to check or censor what is said.

I don't listen to the programme now that I don't drive to work, but I used to enjoy "Today" and especially the "Thought for the Day" from Rabbi Lionel Blue, a very witty raconteur. See here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Blue