I don't always agree with Ben but on this, he is absolutely right...
(media.greatawakening.win)
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Come on, Mark. It's just an expression, like unthinkable. Is that one off limits too, because it's possible to think about anything? Maybe instead of "unspeakable" he could have used the fresh, vibrant descriptor "bad".
I know some grammarians who like only short, punchy sentences of as few words as possible. They consider nearly ALL adjectives and adverbs unnecessary—which in a sense they technically are. Adjectives and adverbs are seldom an absolute requirement; pronouns never are. (That's how all "pronoun wars" can be won by the normal, sane people: just don't use them in the presence of the pronoun obsessed. :)
Each to his own. IMHO modifiers, judiciously applied, add color and life to writing.
Good insight on the bullshit practice of sticking emotional modifiers in supposedly neutral news items. That crap drives us all crazy. It's not up to some wobbleheaded news-reading mannequin to decide for us if claims of election fraud are baseless or not. That's OUR job.
In the context, he was saying “unspeakable evil”, so using ‘bad evil’ instead wouldn’t be as good as just using ‘evil’ by itself as a noun.
I get what you’re saying in general, and I’m not such a stickler that I don’t see the value in spicing words up sometimes. I don’t like when it’s done insincerely, such as a form of gang code. Like that essay the other day about tumblr, how the girls there won’t even get their argument heard if they don’t first satisfactorily convince of their empathetic bona fides.
Another reason to limit adjectival embellishment—it leads to redundancy :)