I don't want to renew any brouhahas over the use or avoidance of excessive modification--Golias' Razor, as it has been explained, seems like a good guideline imo--but the argument that nouns and verbs are somehow "more concrete" than modifiers always gets my goat, for two main reasons.
I suppose the argument is related to the argument against abstractions: who can say with certainty and agreement what "beauty," or what "lugubrious" is? But nouns are also abstracts--we don't often picture the same "bed" when we hear that word. Often, I experience fore-modification in a pleasant way: first, my mind is given abstract qualities; then, my mind is "brought down to earth" by the noun being modified; and the effect of this construction is similar to the way a telescope or microscope is focused onto an object, except that these abstract qualities are given body without being themselves erased from my mind. It's a union of Heaven and Earth, whereby the heavenly is given form on Earth. The effectiveness of this method will depend on the modifiers which have been used as well as the noun or verb, and upon how well these combinations work to blend the two abstracts of modification & noun/verb. The opposite construction, of aft-modification, often appears to be the ascription of the heavenly upon the mundane--and is not always as effective, because I am given a "bed," for instance, which I have already pictured one way but am now suddenly to imagine in a quite different way than I had imagined. Again, so much depends on the choice of modifier and noun; and modifiers, like nouns, fit in so many different categories.
The second reason I am hesitant to ascribe to nouns and verbs a superiority is similarly related to the concept of abstraction: exotic nouns and verbs often seem, to me, more abstract than common nouns and verbs, and therefore, less "concrete." Arguments can be made for the use of cliché--primarily, that cliché is immediately recognizable, familiar--and the same arguments can be made for the use of common nouns and verbs over their exotic synonyms. This is likely to be a matter of taste as well as a matter of personal familiarity, of course. I have read abominations which displayed the exotic for the sake of exoticism--which nonetheless kept within the prescribed/proscribed bounds of Golias' Razor--and have been left cold by those attempts at "the concrete." Frost might be a good example of good use of common nouns: tree, flower, sky, spider, etc. Of course, any argument will fall back on the idea of le mot juste, whether the right word is a noun, verb, or modifier; but because nouns and verbs can often seem more abstract than some modifiers, I have difficulty naming one class of word "superior" to another.
Incidentally, I'd say that verbs tend to be less abstract than nouns, in their use--"running" via legs will seem much the same whether the creature is a human or an alligator, whereas "human" and "alligator" can be imagined in so many guises--but this is probably due to the already-abstract quality of verbs: they describe more-or-less universal processes rather the variegated real objects described by nouns.
Curtis.
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