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.

Private Eye Speak

The British satirical magazine Private Eye has a language all its own that it has been using for at least 30 years. Here is a crib:

fragrant hackette: female journalist, from the free “Fragrant Towelette” – a baby wipe saturated with eau de cologne in a sachet – that you used to be given on cheap flights. A hack is a journalist.

(Shurely shome mishtake. Ed.) The slurred speech is from the late William Deedes, editor of The Daily Telegraph. It’s supposed to be a comment the Editor has written on a proof.

Who he? What that? Who they? Harold Ross, founder of the New Yorker, used to write this on proofs. He wasn't surprisingly ignorant of modern life, he was pointing out that the writer had used a pronoun without an antecedent.

Private Eye inserts (Who he? Ed.) after the name of someone who thinks they ought to be well-known. And (What that? Ed.) after a ludicrous term for something risible.

Ugandan discussions: This allegedly derives from an incident at a party when a female guest came downstairs from tête a tête where “we’ve been discussing the situation in Uganda” with her dress on inside out.

The Grauniad: The Guardian newspaper, because it used to be full of misprints. There are various explanations, some involving the need to catch the last train from Manchester (where it was once produced).

tired and emotional: What politician George Brown allegedly was when pictured being held up by two mates.

Polly Filla: Any female journalist employed to fill a column with witterings about her personal life. Jilly Cooper and Katharine Whitehorn started the trend – but they were sharp, observant and funny.

Are they in some way related? Can they possibly be related? (Caption under photographs of two unlikely celebrities.)

[sic] Latin, it means something like “just so”. Journalists add it after a verbatim quote that uses words incorrectly, to show that it’s the speaker’s mistake, not theirs. Private Eye adds it after something sickening, following Dorothy Parker, who wrote: “Sic. Sic as a dog.”