Advice on writing usually tells you to eliminate adjectives, but this
is only good advice if you don't know any beyond major, key and
wonderful. You can say a lot with an adjective. You can nail a whole
phenomenon. A lot of those I've listed are pejorative and also slangy –
maybe because the polite people who make the rules about polite language are also making a
good thing out of being vacuous, smug, stuck-up and slippery, or selling philosophies that are smarmy and chicken-soupy.
A plodding and sometimes self-regarding technical dreariness blights several of the surrealists: Dalí, Ernst and the awful, slithery Yves Tanguy. Adrian Searle Guardian
bulbous Hepworth rubbish (in the new Hepworth gallery) clip-on (“all those clip on bits of pop ornamentation” on postmodern architecture – Charles Holland)
I was up against chillingly bright people from Wye College. sepulchral (a half-demolished 70s shopping centre in Aylesbury) betweenchannels.blogspot.com terrible, laboured, empty, bonkers, tedious, “pompous and clumsy and utterly miserable for no good reason”, eerily joyless, stupid, arrogant, insolent, lumbering, inane Jonathan Jones on Mark Leckey, Guardian May 24, 2011
The insultingly vacuous and frankly bizarre prose of the content farms — it seems ripped from Wikipedia and translated from the Romanian — cheapens all online information. NYT
40-watt celebrity (Nancy Banks Smith – NBS)
abrasive
whimsy … aggravating shtick… Dorian Lynskey on Yoko Ono’s avant garde singing
style Guardian June 18 09
achingly
earnest Until I came back from Eastern Europe I hadn't often had to put up with
a certain kind of person that infests the universities and intellectual circles
of America and Western Europe. I refer to the kind of "progressive"
intellectual I call the Achingly Earnest Young Radical... (rantsand.blogspot.com)
During the years of civil rights protests and, eventually, legislation,
Hollywood's South became the site of achingly earnest, eat-your-greens
dramas about race relations... (New York Sun)
achingly hip
achingly PC
(edinfilmfest.org)
acidic
("Negative reviews and acidic blogs" Web)
adhesive for someone who sticks to you like glue
affected
Claire Potter’s bohemian décor in Death of a Ghost by Margery Allingham
(Chianti bottles, folkweave bedspreads, bright pottery mugs etc. She spots that
it’s OK when you’re a student, but when you’re middle-aged it just looks sad.)
affectedly
bohemian Tracey Ullman in
Plenty (imdb)
aggravating flights of sentimentality
agitprop buffoonery Guardian June 25 15
agonizing
bourgeois awkwardness that genius Roger Ebert on Tati's Mon Oncle
agonizingly
sentimental
airless
"Yoked as we all are to the tyranny of 'shared interests', gasping in the airless hell of lonely hearts-speak" Barbara Ellen November 19, 2006
almost
elaborately bad Liz Hurley's performance in Bedazzled Guardian April 14 07
almost painfully bland locations
Matthew Sweet on British B movies
amusing amusing teapot, amusing lack of electricity
amusingly
unfashionable Libby Purves
annoying (hats worn in Stoke Newington); one of thoseannoying sets that seem to pass for wit in the world of opera Simon Hoggart
June 30 07, annoying
colourful behaviour
arch Who
was it who suffered from fallen archness according to Dorothy Parker?
arresting Sure, the Easter egg thing is a bit silly, but then again so is slicing your
skull open with an arrestingly large Mameluke sword to show your depth and
breadth of religious devotion. http://thecoldlightofday.blogspot.com/
arse-clenchingly
"...arse clenchingly earnest namby pamby naming ceremonies with poetry and
humanist types in baggy linen suits..." Guardian
arthritic: The sometimes arthritic hierarchies of the old far left Laurie Penney New Statesman February 2011
Arts Council the Two Marks, who used to juggle and unicycle in the old school Arts Council
style. Web
asinine The 10 Most Asinine Movie Twist Endings (cracked.com)
attention-grabbing
avidly right-on
awesomely dreadful (Nicholas de
Jongh)
awesome waste of public money Times on CIA research into psychics, Aug 5 10
Adjectives A
