Awesome

I read recently a saying "the adjective is the enemy of the noun", and of course this at first seems counterintuitive. Adjectives help nouns, surely? They describe things, they add color. What can be wrong with that?

There was a lovely example of this in today's Crikey. The editor of an Australian regional newspaper sent an email to all staff asking them not to use Anzac Day as an excuse to write mushy rubbish. He said, "Anyone who includes two or more adjectives in a sentence will be shot (metaphorically)...".

I remember years ago, watching a travel show with my then wife, and one of the presenters was a childhood friend of hers so we were hoping he'd do well. He was having problems finding enough words to describe how great everything was on some trek, and we knew he was in trouble when there was a shot of him looking out of the window of a bus, at a mountain range, and all he could some up with was 'these mountains are... awesome'. In a similar vein, there's a lovely video of the Pope finishing a speech on his recent trip to the US, and President saying to the Pope, "awesome speech".