Page 303 - Word Power Made Easy: The Complete Handbook for Building a Superior Vocabulary

want to say, but the best they can do is sputter!

The adjective: inarticulate

4. much talk, little sense

Miss Bates, a character in Emma, a novel by Jane Austen:
“So obliging of you! No, we should not have heard, if it had not been for this particular

circumstance, of her being able to come here so soon. My mother is so delighted! For she is
to be three months with us at least. Three months, she says so, positively, as I am going to
have the pleasure of reading to you. The case is, you see, that the Campbells are going to
Ireland. Mrs. Dixon has persuaded her father and mother to come over and see her directly.
I was going to say, but, however, di erent countries, and so she wrote a very urgent letter

to her mother, or her father, I declare I do not know which it was, but we shall see
presently in Jane’s letter …”

The adjective: garrulous

5. unoriginal

Some people are completely lacking in originality and imagination—and their talk shows
it. Everything they say is trite, hackneyed, commonplace, humorless—their speech patterns
are full of clichés and stereotypes, their phraseology is without sparkle.

The adjective: banal

6. words, words, words!

They talk and talk and talk—it’s not so much the quantity you object to as the
repetitiousness. They phrase, rephrase, and re-rephrase their thoughts—using far more
words than necessary, overwhelming you with words, drowning you with them, until your
only thought is how to escape, or maybe how to die.

The adjective: verbose

7. words in quick succession

They are rapid, uent talkers, the words seeming to roll o their tongues with such ease

and lack of effort, and sometimes with such copiousness, that you listen with amazement.

The adjective: voluble

8. words that convince