Grandpa Greg's Advanced Grammar: OBJECTIONABLE ADJECTIVES

 

Authors' Note:  The author disavows overly blunt speech and writing, but finds the tendency to embellish disconcerting. Efficacious seems to be used disproportionately when effective or efficient would do nicely. Other words with inflated frequency of usage include symptomatology, methodology and, yes, even usage. 

Authors' Note:  Pretentiousness may be at work when the word fulsome is (ab)used by a writer or speaker who feels that full is not sufficiently impressive.

Authors' Note: In English there are fortunately many nouns that we can use as adjectives when the situation demands. In the opinion of this author, summer (adj.) and winter (adj.) are less cumbersome descriptors than estival and hibernal, despite the opinion of some lexicographers. 

Authors' Note: Around the globe, hundreds of thousands of doctors have learned the microscopic appearance and function of tissues early in medical school through the study of histology. (The corresponding adjectival forms are histologic or histological.)

The role of histonomy, if any, as well as that of its adjectival derivatives, is considerably less certain.

Authors' Note: 

ovine: adjective pertaining to sheep
ovular: adjective pertaining to egg

A broad spectrum of adjectives, many abstruse and pedantic, are based on Latin roots. A few of these, like bovine and regular, have been fully adopted into modern speech patterns. Others, such as the pair ovine and ovular, are a source of confusion. A minority, including the relatively obscure floccular, do rhyme with each other, providing a benefit only to poets. Is floccular snow falling? The author finds that use flaky.

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