She was an attractive woman; any man could see that. Made sense then, every man wanted to be with her. Slim where it was required and voluptuous where it wasn’t, auburn hair shrouding a flawless face; dark eyes throwing up the contrast to her plump red lips, (Insert Preferred Exotic Name Here) was exquisite.

The above paragraph provides an adequate description of a generically beautiful woman; yet by adding a few qualifiers – largely unnecessary adjectives or adverbs – otherwise known as ‘superlatives’ (although, as scholars may point out, ‘superlative’ can be an adjective all by itself, just not in this case, thank you), I could have made it more than adequate – could have made it superlative – which, let’s be fair, in this modern world, is really/quite/pretty/very easy to do.

Admittedly, the written and the spoken word are dissimilar in usage in that, when someone is writing, firstly, generally, they give themselves more time to decide which words to apply and, secondly, they have the ability to read through the draft excerpt and edit any sloppy/foolish/extraneous speech before offering their words to the world; conversely, when someone speaks their thoughts, words tend to be delivered more quickly thus are less filtered, often resulting in humiliating and/or regrettable comments which, as the world will be quite aware, can be rather difficult to retract.

Indeed, he was quite aware, it would be rather difficult; it was kind of annoying and, to be honest, a bit shit. Conversely, he was aware it would be difficult and annoying; it was shit.

Which of the above sentences reads better? The former, wordy and arguably more descriptive, is more akin to spoken speech while the latter, less wordy and ultimately simplistic, is more like one would expect to read rather than hear.

The obvious question, therefore, why did I write this article?

First, another question: how do speech patterns/dialect become fashionable? Social Media perhaps – Facebook? Right, early 19^th century, first Cockneys of England, big fans of liking and sharing Facebook posts about their mortal enemies being ‘brown bread’…?

A nation’s dialect, generally, is decided by the speakers therein; one person utters a phrase which another person perceives as funny/memorable/worth repeating/worth hearing again, nek minnit, a fashionable proverb is born and from that, potentially, a variant vernacular.

Dialects/vernaculars/speech patterns can go out of vogue as easily as they arrive, too; who, in this modern age, even knew that ‘wherefore’ meant ‘why’? Of course, in Shakespearean times, ‘Wherefore art thou?’ meant ‘Why are you?’ yet that dialect vanished centuries ago.

Back to the original question; why did I write this? Alright, my first published article was ‘Mit Reklaw’s Truth on Speech’ and, although Sunday News chose to call it something different in print, it described the ridiculous nature of, thus my ongoing frustration at, modern speech patterns; over five years on, you might say, I’ve written a sequel.

The issue I have with the way we’re going, at least in New Zealand, is that everything is either ‘very good’ or ‘very bad’; please understand, ‘hate’ is not the opposite of ‘like’. It doesn’t need to be ‘really good’, it can just be ‘good’. It doesn’t need to be ‘so awful’, it can just be ‘awful’. You don’t need to be doing ‘pretty well’, you can just be doing ‘well’. You don’t need to ‘quite like’ it, you can just ‘like’ it; if you no longer ‘like’ it, you don’t need to ‘hate’ it, you can simply ‘dislike’ it.

The problem is, we’re using our words so thoughtlessly and needlessly, attaching qualifiers to everything we say and write, we are running really really really short on superlatives; now, in order to highlight a subject/topic, it seems the only way we know to emphasise our meaning is through repetition – of words or through exclamation points!!! (Also, millennials, stop putting a space between your word and your punctuation mark !!!)

Consider this: when Facebook began, if something appealed to you, you could ‘like’ it; well, ‘like’ has since been pushed back to merely a symbol of recognition and now if you genuinely like something, you have to ‘love’ it – but who truly loves to see a picture of what their friend is preparing to eat that night?

Too many words.

Article by Tim Walker

Edited by Whirr D Power

Photography by Don Tova Yuse