‘Long winding’ staircase or ‘gently curving’ staircase or both? Or don’t bother to describe it?
As in: ‘The two doctors parted company and the younger one went down the staircase to the floor where his surgery was located.’
The scene is the former lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island) in New York City.
The problem is, it was quite an attractive building, and really deserves some description. Some buildings are like that, they’re almost pleading to be described. And if you describe them you’re kind of congratulating the architect who designed them.
Even though he’s dead.
You never know, he might be looking down at us thinking ‘I wish someone would describe something that I designed.’
On second thoughts maybe not.
Maybe the lunatic asylum wasn’t his finest piece of work, maybe he was even ashamed of it, because of the ‘terrible’ purpose that it served.
Let’s face it, ‘long winding’ is a pretty over-used way of describing certain places. Just about every road, highway, footpath or track that deviates from a straight course, however slightly, is described as ‘long winding’ or ‘long and winding.’
The Beatles ruined it with their ‘Long And Winding Road’ song. Before that, you could get away with using ‘long and winding’ and no-one would realise that you had no idea how to write description.
‘Gently curving’ isn’t as bad, it isn’t as over-used as ‘long and winding,’ but it would be great to find an alternative to it.
How would it look like if you used both?
As in: ‘The two doctors parted company and the younger one went down the long and winding gently curving staircase to the floor where his surgery was located.’
Terrible.
Four adjectives in rapid succession.
Someone, maybe an editor, who knows about these things, or is supposed to do, might think: ‘Hmm, looks like his Over-Used Adjective Creation Tool (if there is such a thing) was set to automatic rapid fire.’