Some words just signal BOO or HOORAY! Eighteenth century Philosopher Jeremy Bentham called them derogatory and eulogistic terms. They sum up an entire attitude and somehow make it impossible to disagree. Boo words contain a covert sneer, they're indirectly snide, they convey a patronising attitude. Hoorays are more rare.
Hooray!
Speak out give liberal viewpoint (Pope to speak out against abuse. Gen Petraeus speaks out against Koran-burning.)
transform It’s always good. “We’re going to transform British education” – you might transform it into something ghastly.)
vibrant all-purpose hooray word
Here's Rachel Campbell-Johnston on the reopening of Leighton House,
Times April 1, 10. It’s a Victorian house, so she has to use words like
"stuffy, sedate, Victorian
extravaganza, fusty, stultifying, sedate, ostentatious, gloomy".
But the painter Frederic, Lord Leighton was far from a typical
Victorian, and his house was right out on a limb. The complete article
is here.
"In a fast-paced postwar world in which Victorianism
came to be seen as a byword for everything fusty and repressive,
mawkishly sentimental or irredeemably bourgeois,
19th-century tastes fell right out of fashion. [Rachel still seems to
be suffering from this mindset.] The visitor inhales the stultifying atmosphere of an era …
Lowering [think she means “louring”]
mahogany and glittering gilt, bronzes and ceramics, contemporary
drawings and classical casts all come together to capture the spirit of a
more sedate era. The
foot falls heavily in this gloomy palace of culture…"
preach When believers tell others about their ideas, it is "preaching". When nonbelievers do it, it is "aggressive atheism". @richardwiseman
belch Industrial processes you don't like always "belch" smoke, sparks, fumes, sulphur, steam etc.
clinical unsympathetic, unemotional Should mean what we do in clinics (doctors use it this way).
consumerism Chavs buying chavvy things.
controversial Overused, typically to show that the writer disapproves of something ("the government's controversial academy schools scheme"). Guardian stylebook
cosy English, Merchant/Ivory, repressed, old-fashioned, uncool, books about people with servants, corseted, naïve, escapist, unrealistic, slow, talky, beloved of people who are afraid to look reality (CGI, violence, sex, explosions, fast editing) in the face
didactic Some time in the 80s educationists decided that teachers shouldn't be didactic, ie teach. So they have to include exercises that the children can do in couples and groups.
dutiful Has overtones of conservative or even prissy and dull. "On the elm-lined streets of Washington's Fourth Ward, where residents live in neat brick houses and dutifully tend their azaleas." New York Times "The active membership of the Church is largely made up of devout, personally conservative and conforming people who dutifully care for their families." Web 19th century women dutifully stitched samplers. People dutifullyattend meetings and lectures when they could just “attend” them. Monks are particularly dutiful…
fusty old-fashioned, uncool (see musty and stuffy)
gritty A rare hoorayword, it means "real, working-class, fiction about criminals and working-class people with graphic sex and violence". Ie not quaint, cosy etc. "All their cliches about Glasgow writers were fished out and
came in handy, although Catherine Lockerbie, in the Scotsman, suggested that
'abuse of the adjective 'gritty' should henceforth be deemed a capital
offence'." Neal Ascherson Independent October 1994 Can be used as a boo word if you want to convey that an area is working class without actually saying so.
guzzle This happens everywhere, from GP surgeries in Britain and the U.S. – where antibiotics are the medicine of choice for just about every minor childhood snuffle - to India, where antibiotics are available cheaply over the counter without a prescription. Here, there is no need for even a rudimentary diagnosis. They are guzzled by millions every day. Daily Mail Aug 2010 (It's usually "sniffles".)
heavy, heavily Somehow this has pejorative overtones.Heavy sauces, heavy pelmet arrangements, heavy make-up.
hawking Overselling things you don't want.
institution marriage is an outmoded institution (and "fusty and old-fashioned" according to the Guardian March 27 10)
march, swathe The solution is to “march Muslim children into separate institutions where, swathed in Koranic teachings and constrictive dress…” Janice Turner Times Feb 14 09 You can tell she doesn’t like the idea of faith schools, can’t you?
mass market, mass media, mass culture Those ghastly chavs again.
materialism Chavs buying vulgar things especially flat-screen televisions – in the olden days it was colour televisions we disapproved of. The wrong people making more money than us.
mob Crowds of people who aren't university lecturers and don't live in Hampstead, Crouch End or Notting Hill. So much meaning is loaded onto the word "mob" that it has an entry of its own OR IT WILL - LINK GOES HERE
monger Costermongers just sell apples. But an opinion monger, rumour monger, scaremonger or doom monger is clearly up to no good.
musty old-fashioned, uncool (see fusty, stuffy)
peddling Someone you disagree with is
expressing his views. (Thank you, Sasha.)
petty bourgeoisie, kingdoms, officials, bureaucrats, traders The bourgeoisie were only small, or “petit”.Accusations of abuse in the Catholic Church were apparently only "petty gossip" which we should ignore. The reviewers of the Douanier Rousseau exhibition loved calling him a "petty official". (Unlike most of the modernists, he had no private income and worked for a living as a customs officer or douanier.)
quaint Very, very damning.
“This classic
book [Alice in Wonderland] is routinely treated as a quaint, almost chintzy
relic of cosiness.” bfi.org (See cosy.)
rampant consumerism I don't think they mean "buying free trade chocolate".
rote-learning What children should never be subjected to. Unless you're a Tory who wants to make kids learn poetry. Or is that "win votes"?
scrub What will grow if we don't allow agribusiness, prairie farming ect.
stuffy old-fashioned, uncool (see musty, fusty)
sentimentality feelings we think people shouldn't be feeling. Or else we think (or hope?) that they are insincere.
slum Houses in streets now beloved by gentrifiers.
sniffle Imaginary disease suffered by someone who isn't you.
sprawl "Closes" full of Barratt homes.
strenuously There's something sneering about "strenuously". People "strenuously object" or "strenuously maintain" things. When we say they "strenuously deny" doing something, we're implying that they did it. "They have been strenuously keeping everyone
else out of the picture." Climate-change skeptic books "usually quote the
specialist in insect-borne diseases, Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur
Institute in Paris, who has strenuously and effectively attacked the idea that
increasing temperatures will necessarily produce a rapid rise in the incidence
of insect-borne diseases." "The play is, for all its strenuously attempted wit, as dead as the two men it
describes."
trafficking It just means buying and selling, but now means buying and selling things you don't think ought to be bought and sold, like drugs or people.
trappings accoutrements, perks, badges of office, expensive tasteless things that nobody really needs
trussed Cameron's cuties are photographed "trussed up in jeans and heels" April 10 trussed up in a
full skirt Times on fashion, June 3, 2008(People seem to think it means simply "dressed up" or "dolled up".)
worthy uncommercial, unexciting. Ought to refer to saving the planet or collecting money for refugees but also applied to things that might appeal to the planet-saving demographic – free mask-making workshops for kids which are NOT an (expensive) day out at (common) Alton Towers.
Boo and Hooray
