Ramblings about words, art, books, the media and Golden Age detective stories. Buy me a kofi at: https://ko-fi.com/lucyrfisher
Wednesday, 11 July 2012
Yet More Adjectives
Ignore people who tell you to "kill your darlings" and slash all adverbs and adjectives. They're just recycling an old "How to Write" manual from 1922. More adjectives here, here and here.
arthritic: The sometimes arthritic hierarchies of the old far left Laurie Penney New Statesman February 2011
Bismarck was “a self-centred, neurotic, corrupt, vindictive, treacherous, unprincipled, despotic, gluttonous ingrate, and a habitual liar to boot” Jonathan Steinberg in Bismarck: A Life
comedically bad Owen Hatherley on Southampton’s modernist hotels
fatuous: exemplifies a marketing-led architectural approach with its thin, etched aluminium façade and fatuous decorative balustrades. Kieran Long Evening Standard 20 April 2011
grisly: Making buildings symbolise something is something generally associated with the grisly jokiness of the ‘80s, such as Terry Farrell’s TVAM eggcups and so forth. nothingtoseehere.net
hand-wringing (liberal)
interchangeable: Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami, tends to send me into that pleasant haze of boredom as the interchangeable characters, quotidian detail and clunky metaphors pass by.
Lofty, ploddingly literary and rather affectedly performed, the material may have functioned as a short film, but is not nearly amusing or even interesting enough to go the distance at feature length. Variety on Le Nain Rouge, May 17 1998
mesmerisingly awful Kate Muir in the Times, May 2011, on a book about Wallis Simpson
mindless business park aesthetic @HughPearman
monumentally dull A Dance to the Music of Time darrenlollipopman Guardian Jan 8 2011
oppressively feelgood Philip French Observer Feb 11
sappy and predictable Jonah Lehrer in the Wall Street Journal on The King’s Speech Jan 2011
stiflingly archaic and curatorial Sunday Times on the Fleet Foxes
twee: It’s the self-loving tweeness… @Quantick (David Quantick) on the Hairy Bikers
whimsical nonsense The Times on Terry Jones/Anne Dudley opera about a dog who is a doctor
whiteboy anono-rockers @Bobbi_Betamax
More adjectives here and here and here and here.
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