Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

There doesn't seem to be any adjective attached to the reign of Queen Anne, the final Stuart monarch. Kings named Edward get the adjective "Edwardian" attached to their reign. Queens named Victoria or Elizabeth get Victorian or Elizabethan. And so forth. But nothing is Annean. I guess this is because the phrase "Queen Anne" is so short. One doesn't have to refer to an Annean chair when one can simply say a "Queen Anne" chair without losing a beat.  Okay, this isn't going anywhere.... 

Sometimes ordinary-language words embed deep and important truths. I believe this is the case with the word "realty" for example, which English speaking people use for a certain species of property. Realty looks suspiciously like "reality" and the fact may get us to thinking metaphysically about the fecundity of land, the relative permanence of land versus chattels, fixedness, etc. and how these are all earmarks not just of realty but of reality as well. But I suspect I've said all that before here. Today I'm thinking about another fraught word: evanescence. Or in the adjectival form, evanescent. Indeed, one important feature of this word is that we're much more accustomed to it as an adjective than as a noun: one encounters "an evanescent X" much more often than one encounters "evanescence."  Further, the connotation is almost always positive. We think of valuable things as fleeting. (Which makes this an odd word to couple wit...

I love a good headline.  And I don't mean by this the usual examples, "Headless Body in Topless Bar" and so forth. I mean headlines where there is a central word that doubles as both verb and adjective, especially when the meaning shifts. I vaguely recall an example that said something like this: "FBI Links Bomb Plot, Sleeper Cell." The writer of the headline presumably meant that the FBI had discovered facts that connected a bomb plot to a particular "sleeper cell." If you presume that "links" is a verb, that flows nicely. But what if it is an adjective, telling us something about the bomb plot? If the headline writer reads his paper's sports section now and then, he knows that "links" is often employed as a synonym for the sport of golf, or more specifically for the lay-out of a course. Thus, perhaps the FBI has created a deep undercover sleeper cell that plans a strike against somebody's favorite "links...

Working writers, aspiring writers, and struggling writers have often encountered the hint, sometimes even phrased as a rule, "Eliminate adjectives." Usually Hemingway is invoked just before or after that is propounded. Since the first word of this blog entry served as its first adjective, you might already have grasped that I don't take that hint to heart. But don't listen to me. I'll invoke a higher authority:  Roald Dahl. "He had a fine white mustache and bushy white eyebrows and a wrinkly pink face." That is how Dahl describes the title character in his short story, "The Umbrella Man." That sentence breaks at least three of the rules associated with the authoritative manuals. It uses a weak predicate (the verb is a form of "to have," which is almost as bad as "to be"!) It says something in a lot of words that it might have said in fewer ("he was old but still healthy" might do it for a minimalist). And i...