The Lost Art of Description

C.S. Lewis wrote a book titled Studies in Words that I only just recently discovered; it is an enjoyable read. On page 7 he defines 'verbicide' as "the murder of a word" and writes:

Inflation is one of the commonest [ways in which verbicide happens]; those who aught us to say awfully for 'very', tremendous for 'great', sadism for 'cruelty', and unthinkable for 'undesirable' were verbicides. Another way is verbiage, by which I here mean the use of a word as a promise to pay which is never going to be kept. The use of significant as if it were an absolute, and with no intention of ever telling us what the thing is significant of, is an example. So is diametrically when it is used merely to put opposite into the superlative. . .

Here we come to what has become so common since Lewis' day, in both private conversation and public debate (in which the open examination or testing one's political views or theological convictions is seen by the 'brethren' as treachery),

. . .Verbicide is committed when we exchange Whig and Tory for Liberal and Conservative. But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them.

Two things are worth noting here. The first is that Lewis calls our desire to approve or disapprove of something the cause of our verbicide and not the result of it. This signifies our willingness to kill words in order to offer our verdict on their referent, rather than our willingness to discover a thing's worth by the right use of words. In other words, we are more biased and less reasonable. We are more comfortable making our view palatable and persuasive, even if it means the abuse of language, rather than confront our views 'naked', as it were - to display them as they are in themselves - and in such an honest light let them commend themselves for others' consideration.

The second thing worth noting is that, in such an atmosphere of 'evaluation', we are not as free to describe things as we might think; we constantly feel the pressure to evaluate them and render judgments - often on the spot. Have you ever wondered how so many talk shows and pastors can possibly have so many opinions on so many issues? When was the last time you met someone who claimed to be a political Conservative or Liberal who couldn't refrain at some point in the conversation from injecting an evaluation of his own or the other party?

In so often depending upon explicit evaluations, I think we tragically neglect the most winsome form of commendation: honest and descriptive praise. This is no mere PR spin. What I mean is, at least in my own experience, that the things that have most captured my attention are those that have been commended to me by people whose main objective was not my conversion to their point of view, but rather the clear description of what they valued to much. It's as though my response to them was negligible to them - just as long as they could put before me that which they so greatly admired. We need more compelling descriptions today, not mere recruitment campaigns. If the cause is worthy, it will sell itself.