Show HN: Insteadofvery.com (opens in new tab)

"Few word" is quantity, this is a quality question.

If you are writing to sound eloquent and for the joy of writing then you are not who I am talking about. For most people, especially in a work setting, communication is the goal, to make sure you are understood well.

There is a famous story of a british platoon in ww2 I think calling for US navy support and saying something like "we are in a bit of trouble" or something like that, the US navy commander thought that meant they need help but not urgently so they were deprioritized and died. If both sides used simple and well understood language it would have been avoided. Your eloquence or someone else's use of jargon, jive, localized english,etc... is a miscommunication liability.

To be honest this is one of the more genius things Kevin has said. I respected him for it.

To me complaining about very is some sort of cringey pseudointelligent competition.

In many cases trying to use something else instead of very will add some weird implication or undertone that makes the meaning seem unnecessarily different.

Don't make language more complicated than it needs to be.

Bad analogy, herbs and spice also should be used sparingly not in abundance. Less is more. Use them where it makes sense not as a default.

My comment was for english speakers as a whole not just learners.

Literally never heard the word morose before as a native speaker. Very works just fine and doesn't have nearly as much of a problem of being the 'wrong' word to use when you don't know, versus someone looking at this list and then trying to say something like 'abysmally tired'.

That's not really very good advice. It's good to have a wide vocabulary, but substituting one phrase for another isn't really an improvement. The words mean something slightly different. Poetry happens when you choose precisely the word you want.

Even better is to avoid the adjective entirely, unless that is precisely what you want. Usually a poet will want to stir the emotion, which is better shown than told. You have to dig really deep to find a way to express what that sadness means, which will usually not involve the word "sad" at all. Use of the word "very" is a strong hint that you have more to say by phrasing it entirely differently.

He's right about the wooing women, though. Not literally, but that's the right way to teach teenage boys. Women dig men who communicate well.

Counterpoint: very tiree and exhausted are two different levels of weariness. Exhausted means you've reached capacity. Very tired means you are tired much but not yet exhausted. You reduced specificity for the sake of conformity.

Which is also couched in off-puttingly heterocentric language. What if you’re not a boy, and what if you’re not interested in wooing women? Is just not a very big deal to be lazy in that case?

I did, it was well done. I’d rather use the dictionary/thesaurus functionality on my OS/software or a dedicated site for that, though. I don’t really like sites like this because they don’t seem authoritative to me, and I don’t really know who runs them or their motives.

Did you read my links? Mark Twain isn’t talking only about the word “very” either.

> I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English—it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them—then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.

Crimson is kinda like very red subjectively.