Thought for the Day, 1 October 2009

The Rev. Angela Tilby

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.

Trying to find out more led me to the Ministry of Justice's website and to a list of that now vast ministry's Strategic Objectives. I was struck by the number of adjectives in the list: 'efficient', 'effective' - that's about civil and family justice; 'effective', 'transparent', 'responsive' that's about criminal justice; 'controlled', 'fair' that's about migration; 'cohesive', 'empowered' and 'active', that's about the kind of communities we hope for. And so on. Of course there are plenty of nouns and verbs as well, but it is arguably the adjectives which set the tone. I am still not quite sure what the new court will actually do. Adjectives advertise, and they have done that ever since the days of washes whiter. They brighten up the prose of officialdom. The website of Cambridge City Council trumpets the hope that Cambridge will be a 'vibrant, socially-mixed, safe, convenient and an enjoyable place to live'. Heavens. Barely a noun or verb in sight. We are all infected by the pandemic of adjectives. I checked a recent sermon and I found armies of them dancing across the page, usually in threes - they are very community-minded.

Yet when I was at school we were encouraged to be a bit suspicious of adjectives. Rules of syntax kept them firmly in their place. An adjective qualifies a noun or pronoun. They are not the important words like verbs: 'being or doing words', or nouns: 'names of persons, places or things'. For all their flamboyance they don't really tell you much. They may make you feel vital, vibrant and vigorous, but in fact their content is often vain and void. They represent aspirations, worthy ones, perhaps, but they don't come with dates, times or budgets; they are wonderfully cheap because they float free of concrete reality. They soar like helium balloons, raising our sights, but not delivering anything except, perhaps, hot air.

That's why you don't find many adjectives in scientific prose and when you do they are precise and exact. Nor do you find so many in the Bible and when you do they are firmly in their place as small words that qualify greater realities.

When the angels praise God instead of using three adjectives they use only one but repeat it, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts'. Not many of the adjectives we sprinkle over our public prose would bear such repetition. And a salutary exercise, and one to bear in mind during the party conference season, would be to take a blue pencil and cut them all out. Then you will see what is really being said about people, places, things, deeds and actions.