I like to think it’s hard to accurately pin a political label on me. I’m part Democrat, part moderate Republican, even part socialist. I am a fiscal conservative and a social liberal, mixing in pro-tax for public services. I believe in majority rule, but not majority dictation of the rules.

I like to keep people guessing.

But where it’s easy to label me is in thinking and writing: I am a literalist.

No, not literary; I have never written a book and have no plans to do so. Writing more than a few pages of anything is far beyond my attention span.

I’m a literalist in how I think people should describe what they see and feel and believe. In how writers should tell stories. In how to avoid misunderstandings and confusion.

I know a lot of writers (and talkers) love a good adverb or adjective. While those words have their place, they are not specific enough for me. They are not accurate enough. They often are lazy words, used when the writer either doesn’t know or doesn’t care to find out the specifics.

Besides, I was far into adulthood before I even knew what an adverb and an adjective were.

I skipped the first semester of seventh grade, where they taught kids how to diagram sentences. I missed learning those mathematical-looking drawings with slanted lines reaching down at odd angles from a straight line, showing prepositions, modifiers, indirect objects and such.

Only I had no idea what “and such” were. The public schools in Chicago in the 1960s would “skip” kids a semester to level out class sizes, if they thought the students were smart enough to handle it. In my case, that meant missing sentence construction. Not a smart move.

Anyway, maybe that explains, in part, why I cringe when someone says it is a “tall building” — I learned that “tall” is an adjective of “building.” Tell me how tall. Don’t tell me it’s an old home, tell me how old. Give me specifics, not modifiers.

Don’t tell me the budget is tight. How tight is it, how much revenue and how much spending. And what are the largest categories of both.

I want the facts, not a vague adverb or adjective that is more opinion than descriptive.

Describe the scene literally, with details, and let me picture it in my mind. Give me the colors, the sizes, the shapes, the actual numbers. And leave the hype out of it, especially political hype.

Such as, what does “the gold standard” mean when the Trump administration slathers it on heavy to justify every decision — I suspect it has nothing to do with gold. It’s meaningless and hard to verify, which makes it the modifier of choice when deceiving the public.

“Laser focused,” another of the administration’s favorite terms, is a cliché, overused to the point of being worthless. It’s about as detailed as a blank piece of paper. It’s used as a descriptive modifier to justify decisions, a vague generality to settle an argument. It’s hype, not fact, and hype, like lies, is best ignored.

It’s hard enough for the public to make good decisions. There is nothing golden about hiding behind words that don’t inform.