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Originally Posted by Dr. Jamshid Ibrahim  Yes, Pedant of course there is justification for the existence of these general words otherwise they wouldn't exist. The examples you gave show the changes these words are subject to or have already undergone maybe because they are general. But the idea here ist: because some people are not familiar with more specific words they tend to overuse words like: nice, good, bad, happy, great...This means this way they can't express their ideas precisely and are not aware of the varying degrees of intensity of some adverbs or adjectives. This makes their texts boring. |
I'm not saying this is right, and please don't take this too seriously, but there might actually be another way of looking at this.
A lot of people might not have such a wide, or multi-stepped, range of feelings as academics have, so don't find a need to expand their vocabulary any further. For many people, life
is pretty boring - maybe good one day, bad another, with not much in between, or on either side. If people needed to express a more subtle range of emotions wouldn't they'd find a way to do it?
Take Homer Simpson for example....a nice, basically good guy, often in one of only two emotional states: WooHoo! and Doh! ...but with the occasional MMMmmmm. I wonder how many more does he need?
Who are we to say that such people wrong? We can certainly introduce them to different concepts and suggest to them why they might be good to use, but we can't force people to adopt our own way of thinking. Do we have any right to criticise them, or think any worse of them, if they don't?
In some ways communicating using such clear cut differences in expression can be more useful than having to try to work out precisely which point someone is at when they are on a scale with 50 steps.
As for boring, there is a lot of work written by authors using all the words in the dictionary - it is the content which is boring, not how it is conveyed!