You ever wonder what an adjective looks like?  Well, you may not wonder but you’re certainly aware of adjectives. We use them all the time, except for Hemmingway, he really didn’t like them.

Some of them are much easier to imagine than others. The more visual ones you can see in your minds’ eye: blue, muddy, thin. Or auditory ones can be more obvious: squeaky, whiny, shrill.

Or some are attached to people we have seen or incidents that have occurred. Lethargic might bring to mind a lazy friend. Gruesome might recall a terrible accident. Dow e all imagine them the same way? Probably not.

So the other day I was looking for an image a blog entry I was writing. I was actually looking for pictures of ants. I went to Google Image search function. Now of course ant is a noun and Google brought back lots of images of ants. Good job Google.

Then for some strange reason I thought, I wonder what Google’s collective consciousness will think of something that’s not an object. What will the Borg think of an adjective? What do other people think of this adjective? yes, very curious. It’s a good way to expand your adjective horizons too. And we all need that, don’t we?

So I started typing in adjectives. I don’t remember the adjective I started with but for today’s experiment let’s start with squeaky, a more obvious example from above.

Hmm. What did we get? You can go see for yourself. It’s easy. But let’s see.

We have lots of mice, of course. Lots of yellow rubber duckies and some people taking baths. And cleaning services. Squeaky wheels. Squeaky animal toys. And Squeaky Fromme, but that’s a person with nickname of Squeaky. And of course, the obligatory random hottie. Interesting but fairly obvious.

Let’s try another one. Terrible. Let’s see. Pouty toddlers as Terrible Twos. Ivan the Terrible.  Various monsters. The Terrible Towel. Images from horror movies and books. And some terrible hotties. Try it. It’s intriguing.

Of course, sometimes you are screwed by pop culture. Try searching for rancid. Which is great if you are a fan of the band Rancid. Tried all the search tricks I knew but couldn’t get rid of the band pictures. Apparently the collective Google conscience is a bit myopic at times. Only way around was to attach rancid to a noun, like butter. What fun is that? You know what you’re going to get.

Now, you have to be careful what adjectives you type in. Everybody doesn’t think the same way you do. As we know sex sells and it’s everywhere on the Net.  So while it may not be sex per see, sexuality and nudity will be there.  If these types of images bother you, you can try the Google SafeSearch filter. That mostly works. Mostly. So any word, and I mean any, that might remotely be used by someone to describe sex is going to do just that.

But this is an adventure, isn’t it? If we knew what we were going to come across, it wouldn’t be much fun.

So rancid didn’t work so well so I tried acrid. That was a good one. Or paltry. So many words so little time. Which is why it a great way to kill some time. Try it, you’ll like it.