Adjectives 7

Demeaned

demeaning: Who was it who wrote about people dotted about “heritage” restored mills in “demeaning” period costume?

laboured, leaden: The Great British Sitcom Drought continues. Everything that has been wrong with the form for decades is wrong with Miranda: laboured overacting, leadenly predictable jokes, production values that could be rivalled with a camera phone, and an overriding assumption that embarrassment is amusing in and of itself. (AM, Guardian 2013-01-19)

bizarrely cardboard London night-life (imdb commenter on The Saint)

tepid: tepid monster comedy (Bilbo is almost eaten by some Three Stooges-like trolls) Review of The Hobbit

overblown, busy work: It's tremendously overblown, there's a lot of busy work, unnecessary padding to make you think you're getting your money's worth. (Punter describes writing course, from Jessica Mitford’s piece in The Atlantic)

conceited: the sort of conceited blonde tart one used to see in ski lodges flirting with the owner (imdb)

vulgar: Above all, the book betrays an amazing vulgarity. Amateur psychology is expressed in rhetorical questions: ‘He [the 9th Duke] had also collected human bones. Was this a manifestation of the psychological damage his parents had inflicted on him?’ There are some truly frightful appearances of servants’ hall superstitions: ‘Mr Tweed said His Grace was being taken by the witches’ curse. We all knew about it. It had been going on for hundreds of years.’ In descriptive mode, Bailey writes: ‘Tiny points of dust sparkled in front of us, caught in the light that flooded in from the single window.’ (Review of The Secret Rooms by Catherine Bailey)

tame (doctor etc)

preachy vegetarian cookbooks

cheesy: What a cheesy boring Gap advert of a boy 'band' #XFactor (@___Sharp )

snazzy: wearing a rather snazzy cardigan (suspect on Crimewatch)

atrocious cod-Derridean architecture theory (@entschwindet)

eerily tedious: Nosferatu: eerily fascinating in its hypnotic tedium. (@stevenpoole)

hopelessly jaunty chevrons, jaunty blocks of flats, plasticky corporate styles (Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island)

laughable: But if by pastiche you mean a kind of Disneyland version of Jolly Olde England like this laughable heap before me, then thank you but no. (Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island)

misguided: Nearly everything in the city suffers from well-intentioned but misguided meddling by planners. (Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island)

refined: Authentic performances of Early Music circa 1970 were so darned refined.

melancholic: The Amicus film From Beyond The Grave proved an outstanding example of the genre, even though the stories were pretty simplistic. The second tale, in which Ian Bannen becomes involved with unctuous old soldier Donald Pleasance and his real-life daughter Angela, is imbued with a creepy, mildewed seventies melancholia that’s hard to shake off. (www.christopherfowler.co.uk/blog)

bum-numbing: The English Patient - 162 minutes of bum-numbing middle-class claptrap. (commenter on The Middle-Class Handbook)

the woefully slow Archipelago (another MC handbook commenter)

overly ambitious tour concepts wherein an artist bites off more than they can chew. (phoenix.com on Amanda Palmer)

ghastly, jokey, frivolous, Blairite, distasteful, childish, jolly: The colours are simply ghastly, jokey and frivolous in the worst kind of Blairite fashion, a distasteful Cool Britannia vibe… childish jollity. (@entschwindet on the stuttering refurbishment of Park Hill in Sheffield)

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