Maybe I've mentioned this before, but I really dislike descriptive words like adjectives.
Take that sentence I just wrote: I really dislike descriptive words. I could have come up with something else besides really dislike. Despise, I suppose, or abhor. That shows a lot of feeling. Maybe it's not so strong a feeling, so I could say another series of words that means I only somewhat dislike descriptive words. Alternatively, I could make a great analogy. I could say that I really dislike descriptive words the way that ... the way that, uh, squirrels dislike being shot by BB guns. Or the way that toddlers dislike naps. Or the way that ... Alright, let's face it: I'm horrible at those.
Turns out I'm horrible at the whole thing. I don't have a great thesaurus of a mind that comes up with excellent and creative ways to describe things. If I sit for a while and try to think of the best way to say that I really dislike descriptive words, then I'll just think, "Well, how about I really dislike descriptive words." It's simple. It's clear. It's to the point.
Not that I don't enjoy reading good descriptive words. My friends Sarah and Garrett are exceptionally good at them, and I enjoy that immensely. I can still remember a blog post written years ago where Sarah described someone at the grocery store. She described the woman's red face as looking like a welder's face if that welder had forgotten to wear a mask. (See, I'm even bad at summing up someone ELSE'S analogies.) "Genius!" I thought when I read that. And then I promptly put all thoughts of ever being an author out of mind. It struck me in that very moment that I don't have what it takes to write beautifully.
This doesn't bother me, though. Who needs to write beautifully? Sometimes beautiful prose for the sake of beautiful prose just annoys me. Give me a Hemmingway who will talk about walking down by the river at sunset by saying something un-beautiful like, I was walking down by the river at sunset. I don't need to walk through golden streams of glorious blah blah blah. He was walking. It was by the river. And it was sunset. Enough said.
This is why I appreciate American Sign Language. You know how you turn the sign big into really big or gigantic or whatever else that means really big? You sign it bigger and use facial expression. Which means that you're expressing what you really want to say by showing it on your face and in the movement of your hands, and the only "word" you have to use is that one: big. Fantastic!
ASL was meant for descriptive-word-challenged people like me.
(I love ASL the way that ... apples love ... uh, trees? Umm. I love ASL the way that dogs love bones? Hormonal women love chocolate? Toddlers love their blankies? Whatever. I love ASL.)
Oh my gosh. I'm so with you. I started reading a book one of the faculty members here wrote and got SO sick of all the description. Who needs a half a page of flowery words to describe what a room looked like? When I find myself skimming through pages to find the meat of the story, I give up on the book. I tend to write A LOT in my emails, blog posts, etc. I am not quantity challenged, but you probably won't find a lot of flowery description. And I use the words really, awesome, and amazing A LOT. I don't seem to have a bigger vocabulary than that to describe something really amazing. :)
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