brian storey

Imagine getting a new puppy. You can't imagine any animal in the world being better than this one. It's young, fun, cute, fresh, and loves you to bits. Now imagine you've been it's best friend for ten years, developed your own private code/language with it, developed habits and mutual rules of respect, learned your boundaries, taught each other tricks and nurtured each other through sickness and health, spent every night together snuggled up in bed. Do you still care that it's not a puppy? No, because that's a novelty. Novelties wear off. You love it because it's your partner, it understands you, and you two are soul mates. That's what it's like with a person, except that it goes deeper, and can last longer, because you share the same spoken and written languages and life expectancy.

So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays.