Dead Words

We're two days away from Halloween, so dead words seem like a good topic.

Amazingly, I'd never heard of the term dead words until last week. I'd stopped by my friend Cindy's 4th grade class and she was showing me some of the things they were learning — cool stuff like character development and fictional narratives. Oh what I would have done to have a teacher like her in 4th grade!

Deleting Dead Words

Cindy pulled out a student's notebook to show me some examples and it fell open to a page on dead words — words that are used to death. The kids were learning to spot them and either eliminate them or find a better substitute.

Very is Very Bad

Until that moment I only knew of one dead word — very. On July 4, 1982 (I can't believe I remember the date) another friend, Monica, was home from her first year at college and telling me what it was like. I'm sure she recounted all kinds of tales, but the only thing I remember is that they told her not to use the word "very". So, for the past 27 years I've been paranoid about using that word. Now I find out there are all kinds of words I should have been paranoid about using.

You're probably saying, "Are you nuts? Every one knows this!" But somehow I missed Dead Words 101. So for any of you others who also missed the class, here's the list. Just click.

DEAD WORDS

I can't help but notice that my word "very" has a lot of (oops, "a lot" is also dead, I've got to remember to use "many") alternatives. I can now use: extremely, exceedingly, fantastically, unusually, incredibly, intensely, truly, fully, especially, shockingly, bitterly, immeasurable, infinitely, severely, surely, mightily, powerfully, chiefly.

The scary part is that I see I've used at least a dozen dead words in this blog alone. Yikes!!

A big thank you to Cindy Greetham's 4th grade class for making me rethink my corpse-like words.

Happy Halloween!