cram

The verb cram, in the first of the meanings mentioned by the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) in your dictionary, alludes to making something is full of erasure (wool, fluff, hair, sediment or useless elements).

The concept is used with reference to overfilling a space, sometimes appealing to the force and to the skill to fill its capacity and surpass it. For example: "The British band will surely cram the theater as it has thousands of fans in the city", "I have a packed schedule of meetings for next week", "The museum should not be overcrowded with paintings and sculptures: the visitor must have space to walk and observe the works".

As you can see in the previous examples, it is possible to cram something with physical objects or with symbolic elements. A theater can be crowded with people and a museum with plays: the people and the paintings have a physical existence, they occupy a place in a concrete way. On the other hand, the meetings that fill an agenda are abstract, and have not even occurred at the time of recording them in the agenda in question.

A text, on the other hand, can gorge itself on words. It can be said that the expression "The beautiful young woman wore extravagant dark pants with a flowered shirt as she walked slowly through the beautiful cobbled streets of the old French city" is crammed with adjectives.

The excess of adjectives does not usually receive positive opinions from critics, unless they are particular cases in which the authors have enough talent to make sense of such expensive of words. In general, these are writings arising from lack of experience and based on the idea that more is better, invalidated on numerous occasions when contrasting creations of this type with those that manage to communicate the same or more using conciseness.

In colloquial language, the idea to gorge with reference to a binge on food: "My mother has prepared so many delicacies that on Christmas Eve I'm going to gorge myself on food", "Why do you eat so much junk food? It's not healthy for you to gorge yourself on hamburgers and fries ".

The idea of ​​"gorging on food" can lead to more than one interpretation with very different meanings and consequences. On the one hand, it is normal to use this expression to describe a social gathering in which the dishes They were delicious and hard to resist, so the guests decided not to measure themselves but to eat until their bodies prevented them from continuing.

But this unbridled action can reflect a state of great anxiety and anguish that prevents the person from stopping eating, without seeming to care what damage this may do to your body. Gorging on food To cover up an emotional problem or to try to escape from it can result in serious health disorders, and in no way does it achieve the objective set in the first place, since the problems will still be there once satiety is reached.

If we refer to the dictionary definition presented in the first paragraph, we will notice that one of the adjectives with which it describes the type of things that are usually used to crowd a place is "useless": to cram is to fill a space with useless things, even surpassing the ability available to the detriment of place and objects.

That said, both a work crammed with adjectives and the action of gorging on food consist of exceeding the limit elements in their respective context and end up damaging it, as well as representing a real waste of resources.