to give good, plain, strong English the go-by and to indulge in the
embroidery of adjectives. Tawdry adjectives such as 'beautiful',
'lovely,' 'horrid', 'awful', and the like worn tinsel. I suppose I
might venture the assertion without fear of contradiction, that this
is the stock in trade in most young girls in qualifying their
conversation. The use of that tinsel gives a wholly unreal tone to
what is being said and is so pregnant with affectation as to be
tiresome. Between slang and adjectives, it is hard to choose, both are
so detestable from a woman's lips. The difference is that the adjective
insidiously captures the refined mind, while slang only holds captive
the coarse mind. In a plain and intended to be truthful statement of
any occurrence, the injection of three or four adjectives will change
the whole tenor of narration, and give it a vraisemblance of untruth
which it is hard for the hearer's mind to erase. As a matter of fact,
an adjective ought to be a thought, not a word. A fact should be stated
without embroidery, and we should think whether it is beautiful, lovely,
and the like. There are many thoughts in the human mind that are not
translatable into words. They may have been in some other language
long gone, but they are not so in ours. As those words have gone into
oblivion, so should the majority of our English adjectives follow them.
I have forgotten to tell the patient I have been sitting up with. It
is the adjective 'tasty.' Years ago Mrs. Boyzy set her foot down on
this word, and as in duty bound, I also set my foot down. Whether our
two feet have stamped the unhappy adjective out, or from some other
cause that I know not of, its end has certainly come. As in all fierce
popular outbreaks against long existing oppression, the weakest and
most insignificant of the oppressors are often the first to fall, so
this unexaggerative, unaggressive, ill-sounding little adjective is
the first to die. Let us hope that an early day be appointed unto the
others to follow it.