C&W 2007: Power of Adjectivals

One of the nights that we were running around Detroit a colleague kept telling us stories about her former boyfriends. There was the boyfriend with the short arms. The boyfriend during graduate school. The boyfriend with the irritating mother who wanted to teach her to cook. ETC… And of course, the focus here is on the storytelling. We all got good laughs about these former boyfriend stories and what are colleague learned about herself in the process. Finally, at the end of the night, our colleague made a slip. She mentioned something that pulled two of the stories together. Another colleague and I caught on quickly and started to unravel the web of stories. Lo and behold, the stories were all of the same guy! All evening we had been imagining that our colleague has had this wonderful mish-mash of relationship experiences (which indeed, she has) with a variety of individuals (nah...we didn’t think she was a hussy, not us!).

I wish my students had been there to participate in this event. It was a wonderful lesson on the power of adjectivals. All of the different detailed descriptors about the noun “boyfriend” made it appear that there were many more boyfriends in play. Buy splitting up the telling of the adjectivals we slowly built a very multi-faceted understanding of this individual.

Enough of being a word/communication geek!

June 04 2007 | Posted in C&W