The Writers' Circle

Good and bad, tall and short, cold and hot... These adjectives were created to assist us in describing things. And some of us have actually fallen prey to accepting these describing words as absolutes with a definite meaning.
	When a Parisian friend of mine once told me that it had been a very hot summer, she assumed that I would understand what she meant. But coming from an equatorial country, I could not imagine it being hot in Paris and so I continued the online chat with, "So how hot is it?". And obviously, it was not as hot as I expected it to be from the adjective "hot".
	Similarly, in the recent snowfall that hit London, a few inches of snow resulted in a stand still within the city. Many cars were not equipped for the snow and so there were few cars about, the schedules of the trains in the underground were disrupted and some flights out of Heathrow and Gatwick had to be cancelled. But in an interview on the BBC news, a Russian who was in London was utterly surprised by the outcome and the effect that the snowfall had on the city as a few inches of snow was not a big deal in Russia.
	Are adjectives always relative and dependent on something else? When we look at and think about other adjectives like fat, thin, intelligent, kind and helpful, we find that they are indeed relative. These words are always used in relation to something else, and this something else may not be present, as in John is taller than Paul, but may be a standard that has been set due to our past experiences.
	When you look up at a person and describe him as "tall" or when you feel a mug of coffee and pronounce it "hot", little do we realise that we are actually comparing the object to what we, the subject, know of the adjective from past experiences. We are comparing the height of the person to that of the people whom we normally associate with. Similarly, the coffee is compared to the temperature that we normally take our coffee.
	All adjectives are relative and depend on the perspective of the subject who is making the judgement. There is no good, bad, tall, short... as all these words are comparative, and to exist, they must depend on the subject's prior experiences.
	Another aspect of adjectives is that they do not just indicate, for example, the degree of hotness, but they can indicate quite the opposite. To explain this, let us look at the example of food. When someone eats a combination of chilli and cheese, he may find it delicious whereas someone else on even hearing of the combination of food groups may find it disgusting. (This is actually a national dish of Bhutan known as ema datshi). In this scenario of one man's meat being another man's poison, we can once again see that adjectives do not necessarily indicate a definite, absolute meaning, and that they can also totally misconstrue the meaning of what the subject is trying to indicate about the object.
	Lastly, if a man conceals his neighbour who is a person that a terrorist group is looking for and lies to the terrorist saying that he does not know where his neighbour is, is he a dishonest man? Is he a kind man? Is he a good or a bad man?
	So you may ask, "Do adjectives mean anything?". Well, yes. In a way. Maybe not absolutely, but to a certain extent. It does give one a rough idea of the object being indicated, doesn't it? Or does it?