More Useful Adjectives

A good adjective can reveal new angles.

deeply unglamorous The deeply unglamorous chair of Labour's national executive committee ploughed on through the numbers. Yahoo news on Anne Black, September 25, 2010

feline wonderfully feline assessment of all the leading personalities of the day (blurb for Chips Channon’s diaries)

fey whimsy The Return of Common Sense How the Great Recession has changed architecture—for the better. By Witold Rybczynski Jan. 13, 2011 Five years ago, I wrote an essay for Slate about Mexican architect Enrique Norten. I characterized Norten, whose work I admire, as belonging to the rationalist tradition of Modernism. I also observed that, judging from some of his recent designs, he was succumbing to pressure to produce increasingly unusual and startling buildings more along the lines of the Expressionist anti-rationalism of architects such as Libeskind, Hadid, and Mayne. "It would be a shame if Norten were pulled in this direction," I wrote. "The theatricality weighs uneasily on his unsentimental and tough brand of minimal modernism." Well, he was pulled. In the following two years he designed a number of gyrating skyscrapers whose fey whimsy rivalled the anti-rationalists. Thankfully, none were built—the Great Recession saw to that. slate.com

high-minded (explains so many people)

hovery Waiters at Gauthier Soho “a little hovery” Guardian Sept 10

misty therapy speak Times Tim Teeman aug 27 10

Noddy-book "Wiccan Noddy-book" from Flickr witchcraft group asking for serious pix only

outdoorsy

overdesigned Local resident’s view of the ghastly Quill tower

risibly soppy Plot of Radamisto Rich Morrison Times Oct 10 10

sharp-elbowed The middle-classes – always elbowing each other out of the way in the fight for school places etc.

trite, tedious etc Based on the bestselling book by Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love stars Julia Roberts as Liz, a recently divorced travel writer who embarks on a journey of self-discovery through Italy, India and Bali. The movie is essentially 140 minutes of “wearisome, trite and questionable” psychobabble that entirely wastes Roberts’s talents, said Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times. The film is “packed full of tedious New Age gobbledegook and the sort of moral platitudes you see on car window stickers”, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. “British audiences, and male audiences in particular, will find its very American navel-gazing desperately trying.” September 28, 2010

undernourished
More adjectives here and here and here and here.