Linguistic “Would You Rather?”

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

You’ve probably played that game, Would You Rather, right?

Where you say something like, would you rather never have internet access again or never be able to take an airplane again?

Wow, yes.

That’s a tough one, right?

It is a tough one.

And you learn a lot about people with these.

Yeah, I think I know which one you’d choose, though, in that one.

I’d rather never take an airplane again.

You wouldn’t want to lose your internet access.

But, you know, I had to think about it.

Would I not fly to some place?

But yeah.

And so it’s a way of figuring out what’s important to you.

And I was thinking, well, maybe we could play linguistic, would you rather?

-huh.

Lay it on me.

Okay.

Would you prefer that everyone talk in a language that uses only verbs or only adjectives?

Wow.

I think adjectives.

I think adjectives.

Adjectives?

Me too.

But why?

Well, there was an episode of a show shot in the mountains between Pakistan and India.

And there was a local guy whose English wasn’t very good.

And he was the guide for these, you know, English-speaking British folk.

I don’t remember the show.

Okay.

But his English basically consisted of a string of noun and adjectives.

He, like, didn’t have the verbs and didn’t have, like, the conjugations there.

And he would just simply put them together in long streams of mostly nouns and occasional adjectives.

And it worked.

It really was effective communication.

I think you could do that with adjectives more efficiently than you could with verbs.

Isn’t that interesting?

Plus, there are a lot more choices.

For me, I would choose the adjectives, which is weird to me because I’ve always been taught that verbs are really, really important in your writing.

That you really need to choose strong, specific verbs to liven up your writing.

But when I think about which one I would only use, I think I would have to go with adjectives.

And this is going to sound silly, but I mean, well, the first Portuguese word I ever learned was gostoso, which just sounds so sexy.

What is that?

Gostoso.

What is it?

Something boring, right?

It means delicious.

Oh.

I’m not going to tell you how I learned that.

But anyway, I just, I prefer adjectives.

You made a new friend that day.

Let’s just leave it at that.

Let’s put it that way.

So, yeah, I feel adjectives, we’re kind of in agreement here.

Isn’t that interesting?

There’s possibilities.

Yeah, and lots of different flavors and nuance.

Forget nouns, right?

Yeah, I love this linguistic would you rather.

And if you would love to play the linguistic would you rather with us,

Why don’t you propose one to us and we’ll see if we can put that on the air for you.

877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.