Adjective inflation is the attachment of a conflict-coded adjective, “fiery,” “bombshell,” “explosive,” to a sentence that contains no conflict at all. The modifier supplies the drama the underlying fact doesn’t have, and because adjectives read as color rather than as claims, they rarely get fact-checked the way a verb or a number would.
- A royal spokesperson issued a single flat scheduling correction: a couple would not be attending an event, contrary to a rival paper’s unsourced report. One outlet’s headline called this a “fiery denial” and repeated the adjective in copy. Read the sentence being denied again and locate the fire. There is none.
- A second outlet, covering the identical non-event, called the same statement a “debunking,” a verb that implies evidence was dismantled, when the claim it answered had never had any evidence attached in the first place.
