Séamas O'Reilly: The power of words... and the meanings they hold

"When comfortably middle-class people die of drug overdoses, it is described as ‘tragic’, they are ‘troubled’ and we are ‘devastated’. Less well-heeled addicts are ‘users’ and, well, we tend not to speak about their deaths quite as much at all."

Seamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

There’s a piece of writing I read about seven years ago which I’ve thought about almost every day since. It was from Mark Forsyth’s book Elements of Eloquence: How To Turn The Perfect English Phrase.

“Adjectives,” he wrote, “absolutely have to be in this order: opinion, size, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac”.