Adjacent or near?

Question: What's the difference between "adjacent" and "near"?

My comments:

This is a question raised by a reader who works as an architect. "Adjacent", she said, is a word she encounters often in architectural magazines. "I've looked it up and I know its meaning (near or close to something else). But I wonder why I keep seeing 'adjacent' all the time. I mean, can 'adjacent' be replaced by the shorter and simpler 'near'? If not, why?"

This is a simple question, yet it is one from which we can all learn something.

If you look up "adjacent" in the dictionary, you'll see that "something that is adjacent to something else, especially a room, building, or area, is next to it: The fire started in the building adjacent to the library" (Longman).

NEXT to it.

A building "adjacent" to the library is "near" and "close" to it, yes, but the words are not interchangeable. There are many buildings nearby the library, perhaps, but the adjacent building is the one that sits right NEXT to it. "Next" means the two buildings are sitting side by side, adjoining each other and without any space in between them.

Her confusion, I guess, arises from taking things for granted. In studying English, we often fall into the trap of taking meanings for granted.

We are often careless with English. This may have to do with our Chinese upbringing. The Chinese language is kind of gooey, you see, in the sense that the words are round-edged, vague and esoteric, not at all sharp, pointed and prickly. Try to use a Chinese idiom and you realize you don't have to be precise for it to work. Your idiom does not have to hit the bull's eye to be effective, as long as the words reach the broad target or its neighborhood or, by a stretch, the universe at large. By "universe", I mean precisely anywhere near, even adjacent. In Chinese, this would make sense any way.

But one of the beauties of English writing lies in the precision with which one plays with words, using specific words with precise meanings. John Updike, who wrote the famed Rabbit novels, is known for his precision prose. In Invisible Cathedral (A walk through the new Modern Museum or Art), he wrote (New Yorker, Issue of 2004-11-15):

"In 1996, the Dorset Hotel (fondly remembered for its exiguous lobby and slow elevators) and several adjacent brownstones on Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth came up for sale, and the museum acquired them, giving it a property stretching from St. Thomas Church, on Fifth Avenue, to the Museum of American Folk Art, a few doors up from Sixth Avenue."

I bet the "several adjacent brownstones" in the paragraph above are "next to" the Dorset Hotel, rather than just being in the neighborhood. When you visit New York, don't forget to check it out. But here, I just want you to read Updike for a taste of precision English.

The opening paragraph of the Invisible Cathedral goes (To read the story in full, hit this link - http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/041115crat_atlarge?041115crat_atlarge):

Times Square has been sanitized and skyscraperized; the subway cars are brightly lit inside and graffiti-free inside and out. New York is going pristine. It is not easy, while gingerly stepping over loose floorboards and extension cords as thick as boa constrictors, to picture the new Museum of Modern Art in every tidy and clean-swept detail, but enough was on view last month to persuade this visitor that the final effect will be immaculate, rectilinear, capacious, and chaste. Whether or not more could be asked of a museum, of a modern museum, I don't know. The white interiors, chamber upon chamber, some already hung with old friends from MOMA's collection and some as bare as a freshly plastered storage closet, gave, a few weeks shy of their unveiling to the public, the impression of a condition delicately balanced between presence and absence. The architect, Yoshio Taniguchi, is Japanese, and a riddling Zen reticence presided over the acres of white wall and white-oak floor, the countless beady little halogen spotlights on their discreetly recessed tracks, the sheets of light-filtering "fritted" glass with their tiny pale strips of baked-in ceramic, and the hushed escalators, whose oily works, not yet functional, were exposed to view and to the ministrations of workmen. Looking into these gears laid bare put me in mind, nostalgically, of the early Giacometti sculpture, "Woman with Her Throat Cut," that used to lie on a low pedestal on the second floor, and of Arnaldo Pomodoro's great bronze ball, its polished skin partially flayed, that for a time sat in the old lobby.