October 4, 2004 - Ed is Beautiful

For Sale:  adjective 4 bedroom, 3 bath home tucked-away  in a adjective garden oasis located in the heart of adjective Santa Barbara. Enjoy adjective tranquility in this recently adjective adjective house surrounded by adjective adjective plantings, dozens of adjective trees. Features include adjective southern exposure, adjective floors, adjective master bedroom, an adjective spa, and a 2-car garage.

Remember Mad Libs? Weren’t they fun?  A whole story or essay was just waiting for you to fill in the missing nouns, pronouns, adverbs, verbs and adjectives.  Then you read the resulting text, and enjoy a great chuckle.

Yesterday, the fabulous, gracious, and dedicated staff of edhat.com decided to go looking for wonderful, descriptive and inventive adjectives. And what better more appropriate place than in the marvelous and creative real estate ads?  The real estate section of the Sunday newspaper is just chock-full of glowing adjectives.

So, we got out our brightly colored fluorescent clipboards and our yellow, number two pencils and started our labor-intensive count.

The adjectives we found were unsurpassed and enchanting. The paper we got them from was crisp and folded. We wrote with speed and punctuality (we know these are adverbs).  Our list was lavish and abundant.

In case you don’t know, the real estate section of the Sunday News-Press is extensive. This week, it was 88 pages long. That’s a lot of real estate! But more importantly, that’s a lot of adjectives!  We went through page-by-page, home-by-home, and adjective-by-adjective.  It took longer than we thought it would.  At the end of our journey, we found 244 unique adjectives used a total of 1,044 times.

There were rolling lawns, stunning views, well-appointed neighborhoods, gorgeous landscaping, high ceilings, bright-and-airy roomds, and so on.

There were many exciting and informative ways to sort the wonderful adjectives. We had a fun time grouping them into the un’s and the ex’s. The “uns” are unrivaled, unparalleled, unobstructed, and uncompromising.  And, the “exs” are excellent, exceptional, exciting, exclusive, executive, expansive, exquisite, extended, extensive, extra, extraordinary, and extreme.

While we found 35 instances of remodeled and 22 instances of available, it was the superlatives that we liked the best. In case you were wondering, the common ways to describe a house today without saying anything at all, we found the following superlatives on our around-the-real-estate-market-in-eighty-eight-pages excursion:

Beautiful, charming, great, wonderful, fabulous, gorgeous, stunning, desirable, pristine, excellent, lush, luxurious, premiere, spectacular, classical, elegant, exquisite, lovely, prime, extraordinary, rare, amazing, dramatic, enchanting, gracious, inviting, magnificent, perfect, quaint, breathtaking, grand, incredible, prestigious, quality, secluded, superb, tremendous, adorable, delightful, dreamy, exceptional, fantastic, generous, handsome, impeccable, magical, majestic, outstanding, uncompromising, cheerful, astonishing, awe-inspiring, awesome, charismatic, cute, darling, deluxe, romantic, sensational, sophisticated, sparkling, splendid, stylish, tranquil, unparalleled, unrivaled, unsurpassed, and upscale.

While the most common adjectives we found were new (55 occurrences) and large (49), top adjectives from the list that we had subscribers choose from in Friday’s contest were beautiful (40) and private (38).

See a complete list of all adjectives counted here

Subscribers overwhelmingly chose charming (32) as their guess for most common adjective. Some people chose beautiful, but private was not chosen by very many subscribers overall, and not by the beautiful people.  So, we had no edhat winner today – we will hold the gymnastics class prize over for another day.  What a wonderful, tremendous, exquisite idea!

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