Some words describe amounts and scarcity. A plethora of options floods the buffet table, while paucity and dearth mark shortages of qualified candidates or solid evidence. Copious notes fill notebook after notebook, while multifarious and heterogeneous collections pull from many different sources. Disparate views resist reconciliation because they arise from essentially different kinds of experience. Each of these words names a particular relationship to quantity, from abundance to insufficiency to diversity.
Other words describe how widely something spreads. Ubiquitous smartphones appear everywhere; pervasive rumors linger in the air for days; capricious weather shifts from sunshine to storm without warning. Fickle loyalties change as quickly as public opinion, and precarious positions, a climber on an icy ledge, hang by a thread. Onerous regulations burden anyone who tries to comply, and onerous duties discourage the very people they intend to attract. Insular communities ignore the wider world, xenophobic movements fear outsiders, and intractable disputes refuse every compromise. Antipathy and mutual dislike can harden into long-standing feuds, while voter apathy lowers turnout and weakens democracy itself. Pragmatic leaders, however, accept workable compromises rather than pursue unattainable ideals. Together they describe the texture of life in a world of variability and conflict.
Finally, English reserves vivid words for extremes of approval or blame. Egregious errors shock by their magnitude; ignominious defeats mark public disgrace; nefarious schemes cross into outright criminality; deleterious effects damage health over time. Gratuitous violence adds harm without justification; extraneous detail clutters without informing; fervent supporters remain passionate through setbacks, while prosaic lives feel dull by comparison. Zealots pursue their cause to the exclusion of every other consideration; panaceas promise solutions to every difficulty but deliver none. Inimical policies harm the very people they should help, while aberrant heat waves and cacophonous street noise disrupt the expected order of things. A pristine wilderness, untouched by human activity, contrasts sharply with the debris of a conflagration that destroys entire blocks. The English vocabulary gives us a name for almost every degree of excess and every shade of intensity, helping us describe the world in precise, finely tuned ways.