The Power of an Adjective

In school, if you were the sort to pay mind to what the teacher said, you probably learned that adjectives are simply descriptors.  You were taught that one way to know that it might be an adjective is by seeing if the sentence gets along fine without that word.  "The cat played with the small toy.  The cat played with the toy."  Seems pretty simple, doesn't it? 

Recently Will and I discovered that not all adjectives are created equal.  We found an adjective that changes the rest of the sentence.  "What adjective is that?" you ask.  Sweet.  Yup, sweet.  I don't mean candy levels of sweet either.  Just sweet.

When I initially picked out Will first baby foods I noticed that the containers of organic baby foods had "sweet peas" while the ordinary food just said "peas".  I figured that they probably just added that little adjective to make you want to pay the extra fifty cents for the organic but I decided to buy pack of each, just to test.  So home we went with all our future yummy meals. 

We started with the sweet peas.  He loved them!  He attacked them the way most kids attack chocolate.  We fed him a few other things than went back to the sweet peas.  Despite having had peaches, apples, pears and green beans he still loved though sweet peas.  Then we tried the peas.  Oh what a difference that little word sweet makes.  He wanted nothing to do with those peas.  He spit them out after the first bite.  He turned his head for the second.  When we tried a third time he actually blew them off the spoon!  No peas please! 

Now, before you try to point out that sweet peas and peas are slightly different, well, yeah I know that.  I have always preferred sweet peas myself.  That said, I also kind of thought that that preference was a product of the word sweet.  I thought maybe I was subconsciously drawn to the sweet peas because they called themselves sweet.  I guess I must be wrong.  If even my little guy can tell the difference there really must be a difference.  They often say babies are a good judge of character, well, I have to say my baby is a good judge of the yummy factor!

P.S.  Since then we have discovered that beechnut sells sweet peas that aren't the expensive organic sweet peas.  We tried those and he loved them, for significantly less than the organic variety.  Score one for beechnut and green giant!