Monday 23 September 2013

Adjectives 8

Have you ever eaten at a Harvester before?

glamourless: In a sort of Harvester, eating rethawed food on a table for one, but I like the solitary, glamourless glamour. [Is there a word for this kind of experience? And nostalgia for this kind of experience? Non-places. Liminality. Sudden yearning to live in an orphanage.] (@robinince )

ineffable:
“the ineffable Gurdjieff” (E.S. Turner)

fustian: It is a pompous and idiotic fiction... and it is staged by Vincente Minnelli in an incredibly fustian "Hollywood" style.

conceited: Roald Dahl was “extremely conceited”. Isaiah Berlin

dim, dreary people of utter unmemorability (Philip Knightley on MI5)

awkward communing with pseudo friends…. a series of distressingly underemployed young women. (themillions.com on Tao Lin July 2013)

bizarre tosh: A friend on the radical feminism of the 80s.

whimsical:  'Thought for the day' oddly named given complete lack of rationality, logic or reason. 'Whimsical wittering of the day' wd be more accurate. (Sathnam Sanghera ‏@Sathnam)

dull, middlebrow fiction (The Age of Uncertainty on those books people read at book groups)

Fascinatingly tiresome. An in-depth review of the new Woody Allen. It sounds different from recent twee travelogues. (@kerryshale)


mesmerisingly nuts:
The Telegraph's descriptions of the Chelsea Flower show gardens make the whole thing sound mesmerisingly nuts.... (@elliswoodman)


Sumptuous but leaden… utterly inert… (Guardian May 2013 on Great Gatsby Versions)

cuckoo conspiracy theories: believed in by would-be UKIP councillors

insane: geodesic Macdonalds with internal garden in Georgia, US (Feargus O’Sullivan)

mawkish: An "emo-operetta" that "sweeps us away on a new riptide of mawkish euphoria" (Twilight)

simply awful: Why the Prado are so excited about their simply awful Mona Lisa is beyond me. (@philipmould)

posturing: Postmodernism at its scientifically ignorant and posturing worst.

eldritch: applied to cackles and screeches. Time for a revival.

fey: only word for the catfood advert cat (“I’m a carnivore!”)

measly: A strange, oddly suburban landscape of semis, apologetically detailed, measly in scale and generally nondescript. (Douglas Murphy/@entschwindet)

watery: Chinese contemporary art has come leaps and bounds from the watery Zen landscapes to huge canvases of strange-looking beings. (Scott Davidson)

unspeakably ridiculous: Forget the pretentious, fake, flashy drivel of people like Amis, McEwan, not to mention the unspeakably ridiculous Rushdie. (Amazon commenter)

twee: various pieces of friendly, colourful, twee architecture deployed as fig leaves over the grasping urban developments of the past 15 years. (Douglas Murphy 2013-03-08 Guardian)

flashy: Hadid’s flashy new transport museum (in Glasgow) (Ian Jack G 2013-02-16)

dross: façadist dross (Feargus O’Sullivan)

foolhardy: Building more outer Melbourne suburbs without infrastructure a foolhardy move

earnest: "earnest idealism" of Obama inauguration

paint-by-numbers: the paint-by-numbers quirkiness of Silver Linings Playbook (@bipolarbearnz)

pretentious: So pretentious, hollow and odious that it set my teeth on edge. (National Review on the Draughtsman’s Contract, 1989)

More here, and links to the rest.

1 comment:

  1. I love these. Well worth the world containing whatever awful things provoke them, just for the joy of the language....

    ReplyDelete