Adjectives That Describe Quotes

Isobel's head popped up. "What does 'sagacious' mean?" "Sagacious," he said, writing, "adjective describing someone in possession of acute mental faculties. Also describing one who might, in a bookstore, think to get up and locate an actual dictionary instead of asking a billion questions.

Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them.

I hope it is not necessary for me to stress the platonic nature of our relationship- not platonic in the purest sense, there was no philosophical discourse, but we certainly didn't fuck, which is usually what people mean by platonic; which I bet would really piss Plato off, that for all his thinking and chatting his name has become an adjective for describing sexless trysts.

In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me." [Letter to Joan Lancaster, 26 June 1956]

I take it that “gentleman” is a term that only describes a person in his relation to others; but when we speak of him as “a man” , we consider him not merely with regard to his fellow men, but in relation to himself, - to life – to time – to eternity. A cast-away lonely as Robinson Crusoe- a prisoner immured in a dungeon for life – nay, even a saint in Patmos, has his endurance, his strength, his faith, best described by being spoken of as “a man”. I am rather weary of this word “ gentlemanly” which seems to me to be often inappropriately used, and often too with such exaggerated distortion of meaning, while the full simplicity of the noun “man”, and the adjective “manly” are unacknowledged.

He was beautiful. I know, it’s not the manliest way to describe a guy, but in my head, it was the adjective I used most often and it fit him to a tee.

So sweet and innocent and just... beautiful. I know it's not a typical word to describe a guy, but there is something about the smooth texture of his skin, long blond eyelashes, and the chiseled cheekbones that brings the adjective to mind.

Gorgeous?” Ronan tried again. “Transcendent? Kestrel, the right adjective hasn’t been invented to describe you.

I have people calling me cute. Like I’m a fucking puppy!” she sneered at me, pushing me aside in order to continue on her way. “I am Melody Giovanni Callahan, cute is not the adjective used to describe me!

Evil is an adjective. It is an adjective used to describe those actions of man (and their effects) that are contrary to the nature of God.

Easy' is an adjective used to describe a woman who has the sexual morals of a man.

There are so many moments in our life which we cannot describe with mere words. There are not enough adjectives to justify the emotions behind such moments. Those moments are your life- they define who you truly are

Hemalurgy, it is called, because of the connection to blood. It is not a coincidence, I believe, that death is always involved in the transfer of powers via Hemalurgy. Marsh once described it as a "messy" process. Not the adjective I would have chosen. It's not disturbing enough.

In the language of the day it is customary to describe a certain sort of book as “escapist” literature. As I understand it, the adjective implies, a little condescendingly, that the life therein depicted cannot be identified with the real life which the critic knows so well in W.C.1: and may even have the disastrous effect on the reader of taking him happily for a few hours out of his own real life in N.W.8. Why this should be a matter for regret I do not know; nor why realism in a novel is so much admired when realism in a picture is condemned as mere photography; nor, I might add, why drink and fornication should seem to bring the realist closer to real life than, say, golf and gardening.

There’s nothing “grown-up” about wanting the State to punish people without evidence of guilt so that you can feel safe. It’s actually a deeply childish need at the heart of all authoritarianism - the desire for a big daddy figure to keep you safe from the Bad People even it means there are no legal constraints, due process, or transparency. Children growing up learn that their Daddy is omnipotent and omniscient and exercises his unchecked power for benevolent ends - it’s a nice, safe feeling, and many continue to cling to it in adulthood, hoping the Security State will provide that. Many adjectives can and should be used to describe that need - “grown-up” definitely is not among them.

Adolescent girls discover that it is impossible to be both feminine and adult. Psychologist I. K. Broverman’s now classic study documents this impossibility. Male and female participants in the study checked off adjectives describing the characteristics of healthy men, healthy women and healthy adults. The results showed that while people describe healthy men and healthy adults as having the same qualities, they describe healthy women as having quite different qualities than healthy adults. For example, healthy women were described as passive, dependent and illogical, while healthy adults were active, independent and logical. In fact, it was impossible to score as both a healthy adult and a healthy woman.

I want to wrap my hands around his neck and prove to him just how un-adorable I can be when provoked. Scrappy is an adjective that comes to mind when people try to describe me. I’m quick in a fight. I can sneak under arms and karate chop you in the kidneys—at least I can in my head.

Now Lu wonders if her father worried that moving up through the political ranks would cost him that adjective, beloved. Certainly, almost no politician is described that way anymore. Even the people who vote for you didn’t seem to like you that much.

Lonely is one of the adjectives people like Shane Claiborne use, alongside unsustainable, to describe the culture of adulthood they grew up watching.

Finished' is not an adjective that describes a book that has been read to the point you think you cannot read it anymore. Books never run out.

You regard yourself as tolerant, and in that one adjective you most fittingly describe yourself. You really don’t like people you tolerate them. You are very tolerant, MR. BUT.

There really are people in the world who have ready a list of adjectives about a fat person—including lazy , stupid , messy , incompetent —that they are certain describes her before she ever opens her mouth.

Jesus did not die for our righteousness, but He died for our sins. He did not come to save us because we were worth saving, but because we were utterly worthless, ruined, and undone. He did not come to earth out of any reason that was in us, but solely and only because of reasons which He took from the depths of His own divine love. In due time He died for those whom He describes not as godly but as ungodly, applying to them as hopeless an adjective as He could have selected.

We generally describe the most repulsive examples of humanity's cruelty as brutal or bestial, implying by these adjectives that such behaviour is characteristic of less highly developed animals such as ourselves. In truth, however, the extremes of 'brutal' behaviour are confined to humanity; and there is no parallel in nature to our savage treatment of each other.

The pieces didn't really coordinate and could be described in no other way than 'eclectic', but once labeled 'eclectic', valuable mismatches generally become fantastically stylish. Very similar to the way adding cash value to 'crazy' results in a whimsical 'eccentric'; you have to buy more flattering adjectives.

There are no specific memories of the first time I used ketamine, which was around age 17 or 18. The strongest recollection of ketamine use regarded an instance when I was concurrently smoking marijuana and inhaling nitrous oxide. I was in an easy chair and the popular high school band Sublime was playing on the CD player. I was with a friend. We were snorting lines of ketamine and then smoking marijuana from a pipe and blowing the marijuana smoke into a nitrous-filled balloon and inhaling and exhaling the nitrous-filled balloon until there was no more nitrous oxide in the balloon to achieve acute sensations of pleasure, [adjective describing state in which one is unable to comprehend anything], disorientation, etc. The first time I attempted this process my vision behaved as a compact disc sound when it skips - a single frame of vision replacing itself repeatedly for over 60 seconds, I think. Everything was vibrating. Obviously I couldn't move. My friend was later vomiting in the bathroom a lot and I remember being particularly fascinated by the sound of it; it was like he was screaming at the same time as vomiting, which I found funny, and he was making, to a certain degree, demon-like noises. My time 'with' ketamine lasted three months at the most, but despite my attempts I never achieved a 'k-hole.' At a party, once, I saw a girl sitting in bushes and asked her what she was doing and she said "I'm in a 'k-hole.'" While I have since stopped doing ketamine because of availability and lack of interest, I would do ketamine again because I would like to be in a 'k-hole.

My friend N. D. Wilson was teaching once, and he asked the class to name some adjectives that describe Christian art. We said words like “mediocre,” “cheesy,” “shallow,” “trite,” “saccharine,” and “derivative.” He wrote them on the board, and the class nodded smugly. Then he reminded us that he didn’t specify modern American Christian art. What if we answered that question with people in mind like J. S. Bach, Tolkien, Rembrandt, Carravagio, and George Herbert? The adjectives change, don’t they? And for that matter, I would argue that even modern American art by Christians is far from cheesy and trite—if you’re looking in the right place.

It had been wonderful and magical and all the adjectives that people use to describe “making love.

Guantánamo Bay's motto: 'Safe, humane, legal, transparent detention.' Four adjectives describing one sick joke.

Later, several people in that room would reach for the same adjectives to describe me: sad, desperate, trying to preempt pushback at every turn. It was, one said, like I was defending a dissertation.

Neither my homeland nor America could ever be described as charming. It was too moderate of an adjective for a country and a people as hot and hot-blooded as mine. We repulsed or seduced, but we never charmed. As for America, just think of Coca-Cola. That elixir is really something, embodying as it does the addictive, teeth-decaying sweetness of a capitalism that was no good for you no matter how it fizzled on the tongue.

Not sure how I feel about being described as respectable by the hottest guy on campus, for a number of reasons. 1. It’s not sexy. 2. That’s not how I would describe myself if I had to choose adjectives. 3. It’s not sexy.

Person, Place, Thing (Noun); Describes Action (Verb); Modifies Nouns (Adjective); Answers the W Questions (Adverb); Joins Words Together (Conjunction); Things We Say When We Are Happy, Surprised, or Pissed Off (Interjection).

Many earnest young writers with a flow of adjectives and a passion for detail have attempted to describe the quiet of a great city at night, when a few million people within it are sleeping, or ought to be. They work in the clang of a distant owl car, and the roar of an occasional "L" train, and the hollow echo of the footsteps of the late passer-by. They go elaborately into description, and are strong on the brooding hush, but the thing has never been done satisfactorily.

By the way, leafing through my dictionary I am struck by the poverty of language when it comes to naming or describing badness. Evil, wickedness, mischief, these words imply an agency, the conscious or at least active doing of wrong. They do not signify the bad in its inert, neutral, self-sustaining state. Then there are the adjectives: dreadful, heinous, execrable, vile, and so on. They are not so much as descriptive as judgmental. They carry a weight of censure mingled with fear. Is this not a queer state of affairs? It makes me wonder. I ask myself if perhaps the thing itself - badness - does not exist at all, if these strangely vague and imprecise words are only a kind of ruse, a kind of elaborate cover for the fact that nothing is there. Or perhaps words are an attempt to make it be there? Or, again, perhaps there is something, but the words invented it. Such considerations make me feel dizzy, as if a hole had opened briefly in the world.

To write, to be able to write, what does it mean? It means spending long hours dreaming before a white page, scribbling unconsciously, letting your pen play round a blot of ink and nibble at a half-formed word, scratching it, making it bristle with darts and adorning it with antennae and paws until it loses all resemblance to a legible word and turns into a fantastic insect or a fluttering creature half butterfly, half fairy. To write is to sit and stare, hypnotized, at the reflection of the window in the silver ink-stand, to feel the divine fever mounting to one's cheeks and forehead while the hand that writes grows blissfully numb upon the paper. It also means idle hours curled up in the hollow of the divan, and then the orgy of inspiration from which one emerges stupefied and aching all over, but already recompensed and ladened with treasures that one unloads slowly on to the virgin page in the little round pool of light under the lamp. To write is to pour one's innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one's hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god who guides it — and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower. To write is the joy and torment of the idle. Oh to write! From time to time I feel a need, sharp as thirst in summer, to note and to describe. And then I take up my pen again and attempt the perilous and elusive task of seizing and pinning down, under its flexible double-pointed jib, the many-hued, fugitive, thrilling adjective.… The attack does not last long; it is but the itching of an old scar.

Curran could be described in many ways: dangerous, powerful . . . insufferable. “Elegant” usually wasn’t one of the adjectives used, and as he walked next to me, I wished I had a camera so I could commemorate the moment. And then blackmail him with it.

He was incredibly and unbearably beautiful. There was no other way for her to adequately describe it to herself. It was beyond being just handsome. Handsome was a common masculine adjective, limited in its scope. This man was honestly beautiful. His facial features were so very elegant, taking the term noble to the extreme. Dark brows winged up over dark eyes, both of indeterminate color in the shadows of the night. So dramatic, but then so belied by the ridiculous childlike length of lush lashes. His magnificent eyes were lit with a soft, smoldering light of amusement as his sensual mouth was lifting up at the corner in a smile she could only call sinful. “How did you . . . but that’s . . . you couldn’t possibly!” she spluttered, her hands opening and closing reflexively on his lapels. “I did. It is not. And apparently, I could.” He was smiling broadly now, and Isabella was certain she was the cause of some unseen bit of amusement. She glowered at him, completely forgetting he’d just saved her neck. Literally. “I’m so glad you find this so entertaining!” Jacob couldn’t help his growing smile. She was so focused on him that she hadn’t realized they were still a good ten feet off the ground and floating at the exact spot where he’d met her precipitous fall. That was for the best, he thought, sinking down to the pavement while she was distracted by the taunt of his amusement. He was going to have enough trouble as it was explaining how he’d managed to catch a woman hurtling to her death from five stories up.

Together and separately, we as speakers disproved another description used to disqualify feminists: that we were all “whitemiddleclass,” a phrase used by the media then (and academics who believe those media clippings now) as if it were a single adjective to describe the women’s movement. In fact, the first-ever nationwide poll of women’s opinions on issues of gender equality showed that African American women were twice as likely as white women to support them.8 If the poll had included Latinas, Asian Americans, Native Americans,

shibui (Japanese) Beauty of aging. [adjective] Shibui (shin-BOO-ee), like wabi, sabi, and aware, connotes a certain kind of beauty. Like sabi, and unlike aware, shibui refers to a kind of beauty that only time can reveal. One of the reasons language has such immense emotional power is the way people use symbols to link together several sensory sym-bols to make an emotionally evocative image. Shibui can be used to describe the taste of a certain kind of tea, scenery of a gray, brown, or moss-green color, or the impression a person gets from looking at the face of a certain kind of older person.

I give in,” she gasped. “What has turned your evening into such a dreadful affair?” “What or whom?” “‘ Whom’?” she echoed, tilting her head as she looked at him. “This grows even more interesting.” “I can think of any number of adjectives to describe all of the ‘whoms’ I have had the pleasure of meeting this evening, but ‘interesting’ is not one of them.” “Now, now,” she chided, “don’t be rude. I did see you chatting with my brothers, after all.” He nodded gallantly, tightening his hand slightly at her waist as they swung around in a graceful arc. “My apologies. The Bridgertons are, of course, excluded from my insults.” “We are all relieved, I’m sure.” Simon cracked a smile at her deadpan wit. “I live to make Bridgertons happy.” “Now that is a statement that may come back to haunt you,” she chided. “But in all seriousness, what has you in such a dither? If your evening has gone that far downhill since our interlude with Nigel, you’re in sad straits, indeed.” “How shall I put this,” he mused, “so that I do not completely offend you?” “Oh, go right ahead,” she said blithely. “I promise not to be offended.” Simon grinned wickedly. “A statement that may come back to haunt you.” She blushed slightly. The color was barely noticeable in the shadowy candlelight, but Simon had been watching her closely. She didn’t say anything, however, so he added, “Very well, if you must know, I have been introduced to every single unmarried lady in the ballroom.” A strange snorting sound came from the vicinity of her mouth. Simon had the sneaking suspicion that she was laughing at him. “I have also,” he continued, “been introduced to all of their mothers.” She gurgled. She actually gurgled. “Bad show,” he scolded. “Laughing at your dance partner.” “I’m sorry,” she said, her lips tight from trying not to smile. “No, you’re not.” “All right,” she admitted, “I’m not. But only because I have had to suffer the same torture for two years. It’s difficult to summon too much pity for a mere evening’s worth.

i can’t compact their existence into twenty-six letters and call it a description i tried once but the adjectives needed to describe them don’t even exist so instead i ended up with pages and pages full of words followed by commas and more words and more commas only to realize there are some things in the world so infinite they could never use a full stop

Soon the key word to describe it is the adjective ‘mass’. Thus there is mass culture and mass hysteria, mass tastes (or rather lack of taste) and mass paranoia, mass enslavement, and finally mass murder. The only hero on the world stage is the crowd, and the main feature of this crowd, this mass, is anonymity, impersonality, lack of identity, lack of a face.

THE METAPHYSICAL POETS Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime (Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress) While theatre was the most public literary form of the period, poetry tended to be more personal, more private. Indeed, it was often published for only a limited circle of readers. This was true of Shakespeare's sonnets, as we have seen, and even more so for the Metaphysical poets, whose works were published mostly after their deaths. John Donne and George Herbert are the most significant of these poets. The term 'Metaphysical' was used to describe their work by the eighteenth-century critic, Samuel Johnson. He intended the adjective to be pejorative. He attacked the poets' lack of feeling, their learning, and the surprising range of images and comparisons they used. Donne and Herbert were certainly very innovative poets, but the term 'Metaphysical' is only a label, which is now used to describe the modern impact of their writing. After three centuries of neglect and disdain, the Metaphysical poets have come to be very highly regarded and have been influential in recent British poetry and criticism. They used contemporary scientific discoveries and theories, the topical debates on humanism, faith, and eternity, colloquial speech-based rhythms, and innovative verse forms, to examine the relationship between the individual, his God, and the universe. Their 'conceits', metaphors and images, paradoxes and intellectual complexity make the poems a constant challenge to the reader.

It doesn’t matter what they think. Dance with me.” He took her hand, and for the first time in a long while, she felt safe. He pulled her to the center of the floor and into the motions of the dance. Ronan didn’t speak for a few moments, then touched a slim braid that curved in a tendril along Kestrel’s cheek. “This is pretty.” The memory of Arin’s hands in her hair made her stiffen. “Gorgeous?” Ronan tried again. “Transcendent? Kestrel, the right adjective hasn’t been invented to describe you.” She attempted a light tone. “What will ladies do, when this kind of exaggerated flirtation is no longer the fashion? We shall be spoiled.” “You know it’s not mere flirtation,” Ronan said. “You’ve always known.” And Kestrel had, it was true that she had, even if she hadn’t wanted to shake the knowledge out of her mind and look at it, truly see it. She felt a dull spark of dread. “Marry me, Kestrel.

Normal is never the adjective used to describe you! Exceptional. Notorious. Unstoppable. That is what you should aim for. You’re in pain? Your body aches? Guess what? That’s your life. You think those idiots outside helped you because they cared? Because you’re so precious? They stepped in to make you weak, to drag you down to their limitations, their weaknesses. A helping hand is a selfish one. If you can’t save yourself, you have no right to be saved.

In a world without sky, land becomes an abyss. And the poem, one of condolence's gifts. And an adjective of wind: northern or southern. Don't describe what the camera sees of your wounds and scream to hear yourself, to know that you're still alive, and that life on this earth is possible. Invent a wish for speech, devise a direction or a mirage to prolong the hope, and sing. Aesthetic is a freedom. I said: A life that is defined only in antithesis to death . . . isn't a life!

The adjective “Faustian” describes the insatiable striving for the unattainable, the impossible, for all knowledge and all power, for the infinite and perfect. The Faustian human will bow to no tyrant God. He will worship no God. He will never be a slave, servant or serf. He will have no lord and no master. Religious people regard Faust as having “sold his soul to the Devil”. In fact, Faust liberated his soul from the Devil (the Abrahamic God) so that he himself could become a God.

f-word. It substituted for adjectives, nouns, and verbs. It was used, for example, to describe the cooks: “those f——ers,” or “f——ing cooks”; what they did: “f——ed it up again”; and what they produced. David Kenyon Webster, a Harvard English major, confessed that he found it difficult to adjust to the “vile, monotonous, and unimaginative language.” The language made these boys turning into men feel tough and, more important, insiders, members of a group. Even Webster got used to it, although never to like it.

Runach took the book in hand and went to look for that Bruadarian lass, who was likely having a conversation with the flora and fauna of his grandfather's garden... He just hadn't expected her to be singing. It wasn't loud singing, though he could hear it once he'd wandered the garden long enough to catch sight of her, standing beneath a flowering linden tree, holding a blossom in her hand. Runach came to a skidding halt and gaped at her. Very well, so he had ceased to think of her as plain directly after Gobhann, and he had been struggling to come up with a worthy adjective ever since. He supposed he might spend the rest of his life trying, and never manage it. It was difficult to describe a dream. He had to sit down on the first bench he found, because he couldn't stand any longer. He wondered if the day would come where she ceased to surprise him with the things she did. Her song was nothing he had ever heard before, but for some reason it seemed familiar in a way he couldn't divine. It was enough for the moment to simply sit there and watch as she and the tree--and several of the flowers, it had to be said--engaged in an ethereal bit of music making. It was truthfully the most beautiful thing he had ever heard, and that was saying something, because the musicians who graced his grandfather's hall were unequalled in any Elvish hall he'd ever visited. And then Runach realized why what she was doing sounded so familiar. She was singing in Fadaire. He grasped for the rapidly disappearing shreds of anything resembling coherent thought, but it was useless. All he could do was sit on that very cold bench and listen to a woman who had hardly set foot past her place of incarceration, sing a song in his mother's native tongue, that would have brought any elf in the vicinity to tears if they had heard it. He knew because it was nigh onto bringing him to that place in spite of his sorry, jaded self.

There’s a big default notion that “spare,” or “precise” prose is somehow better. I keep insisting to them that while such prose is completely legitimate, it’s in no way intrinsically more accurate, more relevant, or better than lush prose. That adjective “precise,” for example, needs unpicking. If a “minimalist” writer describes a table, and a metaphor-ridden adjective-heavy weird fictioneer describes a table, they are very different, but the former is in absolutely no way closer to the material reality than the latter. Both of them are radically different from that reality. They’re just words. A table is a big wooden thing with my tea on it.

By the latter part of 1861 the War Department had taken over from the states the responsibility for feeding, clothing, and arming Union soldiers. But this process was marred by inefficiency, profiteering, and corruption. To fill contracts for hundreds of thousands of uniforms, textile manufacturers compressed the fibers of recycled woolen goods into a material called “shoddy.” This noun soon became an adjective to describe uniforms that ripped after a few weeks of wear, shoes that fell apart, blankets that disintegrated, and poor workmanship in general on items necessary to equip an army of half a million men and to create its support services within a few short months.

Terry Allen and a larger portion of his 1st Division descended on Oran from the sandstone hills above St. Cloud, a key crossroads east of the city, and the salt lakes farther south. Children in dirty kaftans shouted “Hi yo, Silver!” or flung stiff-arm Fascist salutes to liberators they presumed to be German. Veiled Berber women with indigo tattoos peered through casement shutters, and in cafés men wearing fezzes looked up from their tea glasses long enough to applaud the passing troops, African-style: arms extended, clapping hands hinged at the wrists, no pretense of sincerity. A war correspondent seeking adjectives to describe the locals settled on “scrofulous, unpicturesque, ophthalmic, lamentable.” Exhausted

It doesn’t matter what they think. Dance with me.” He took her hand, and for the first time in a long while, she felt safe. He pulled her to the center of the floor and into the motions of the dance. Ronan didn’t speak for a few moments, then touched a slim braid that curved in a tendril along Kestrel’s cheek. “This is pretty.” The memory of Arin’s hands in her hair made her stiffen. “Gorgeous?” Ronan tried again. “Transcendent? Kestrel, the right adjective hasn’t been invented to describe you.” She attempted a light tone. “What will ladies do, when this kind of exaggerated flirtation is no longer the fashion? We shall be spoiled.” “You know it’s not mere flirtation,” Ronan said. “You’ve always known.” And Kestrel had, it was true that she had, even if she hadn’t wanted to shake the knowledge out of her mind and look at it, truly see it. She felt a dull spark of dread. “Marry me, Kestrel.” She held her breath. “I know things have been hard lately,” Ronan continued, “and that you don’t deserve it. You’ve had to be so strong, so proud, so cunning. But all of this unpleasantness will go away the instant we announce our engagement. You can be yourself again.” But she was strong. Proud. Cunning. Who did he think she was, if not the person who mercilessly beat him at every Bite and Sting game, who gave him Irex’s death-price and told him exactly what to do with it? Yet Kestrel bit back her words. She leaned into the curve of his arm. It was easy to dance with him. It would be easy to say yes. “Your father will be happy. My wedding gift to you will be the finest piano the capital can offer.” Kestrel glanced into his eyes. “Or keep yours,” he said hastily. “I know you’re attached to it.” “It’s just…you are very kind.” He gave a short, nervous laugh. “Kindness has little to do with it.” The dance slowed. It would end soon. “So?” Ronan had stopped, even though the music continued and dancers swirled around them. “What…well, what do you think?” Kestrel didn’t know what to think. Ronan was offering everything she could want. Why, then, did his words sadden her? Why did she feel like something had been lost? Carefully, she said, “The reasons you’ve given aren’t reasons to marry.” “I love you. Is that reason enough?

A few days after the fireworks, I gave them a lesson on category nouns versus exact nouns. I hadn’t heard of this distinction prior to opening the textbook. It transpired that a category noun was something like “vegetables,” whereas exact nouns were “beetroot,” “carrots,” “broccoli.” It was better to use exact nouns because this made your writing more precise and interesting. The chapter gave a short explanation followed by an exercise: an A4 page divided into columns. On the left were various category nouns. On the right, you had to fill in at least three corresponding exact nouns. I told the kids they could use their Cantonese-to-English dictionaries. Cynthia Mak asked what to say for “people.” Did it mean “sister,” “brother,” “father,” or “teacher,” “doctor,” “artist,” or— “They’re all okay,” I said. “But if I put ‘sister,’ ‘father,’ ‘brother’ in ‘people,’ then what about here?” She pointed to the box marked “family.” “Okay, don’t do those. Do ‘teacher’ or something.” “But what about here?”—signaling the “professions” row. “Okay, something else for ‘people.’” “Happy people, sad people?” “‘Happy people’ isn’t an exact noun—it’s an adjective plus a category noun.” “So what should I write?” We looked at each other. It was indeed a challenge to describe people in a way not immediately related to how they earned money or their position in the family unit. I said: “How about ‘friend,’ ‘boyfriend,’ ‘colleague’?” “I don’t want to write ‘boyfriend.’” I couldn’t blame her for questioning the exercise. “Friend,” “enemy,” and “colleague” didn’t seem like ways of narrowing down “people” in the way “apple” did for “fruit.” An apple would still be a fruit if it didn’t have any others in its vicinity, but you couldn’t be someone’s nemesis without their hanging around to complete the definition. The same issue cropped up with my earlier suggestions. “Family” was relational, and “profession” was created and given meaning by external structures. Admittedly “adult,” “child,” and “teenager” could stand on their own. But I still found it depressing that the way we specified ourselves—the way we made ourselves precise and interesting—was by pinpointing our developmental stage and likely distance from mortality. Fruit didn’t have that problem.

I’d better have a glass then. To complete my ensemble.” Kestrel didn’t quite forget her promise to Arin not to drink, but rather willed it away along with everything else about him. “Oh, yes,” said Jess. “You must. Don’t you think so, Ronan?” “I don’t think. I am thinking of nothing other than what Kestrel could be thinking, and whether she will dance with me. If I’m not mistaken, there is one final dance before this legendary wine is served.” Kestrel’s happiness faltered. “I’d love to, but…won’t your parents mind?” Ronan and Jess exchanged a glance. “They’re not here,” Ronan said. “They’ve left to spend the winter season in the capital.” Which meant that, were they here, they would object--as would any parents, given the scandal. Ronan read Kestrel’s face. “It doesn’t matter what they think. Dance with me.” He took her hand, and for the first time in a long while, she felt safe. He pulled her to the center of the floor and into the motions of the dance. Ronan didn’t speak for a few moments, then touched a slim braid that curved in a tendril along Kestrel’s cheek. “This is pretty.” The memory of Arin’s hands in her hair made her stiffen. “Gorgeous?” Ronan tried again. “Transcendent? Kestrel, the right adjective hasn’t been invented to describe you.” She attempted a light tone. “What will ladies do, when this kind of exaggerated flirtation is no longer the fashion? We shall be spoiled.” “You know it’s not mere flirtation,” Ronan said. “You’ve always known.” And Kestrel had, it was true that she had, even if she hadn’t wanted to shake the knowledge out of her mind and look at it, truly see it. She felt a dull spark of dread. “Marry me, Kestrel.

One feature of our own society that seems decidedly anomalous is the matter of sexual advertisement, As we have seen, it is strongly to be expected on evolutionary grounds that, where the sexes differ, it should be the males that advertise and the females that are drab. Modern western man is undoubtedly exceptional in this respect. It is of course true that some men dress flamboyantly and some women dress drably but, on average, there can be no doubt that in our society the equivalent of the peacock's tail is exhibited by the female, not by the male. Women paint their faces and glue on false eyelashes. Apart from special cases, like actors, men do not. Women seem to be interested in their own personal appearance and are encouraged in this by their magazines and journals. Men's magazines are less preoccupied with male sexual attractiveness, and a man who is unusually interested in his own dress and appearance is apt to arouse suspicion, both among men and among women. When a woman is described in conversation, it is quite likely that her sexual attractiveness, or lack of it, will be prominently mentioned. This is true, whether the speaker is a man or a woman. When a man is described, the adjectives used are much more likely to have nothing to do with sex. Faced with these facts, a biologist would be forced to suspect that he was looking at a society in which females compete for males, rather than vice versa. In the case of birds of paradise, we decided that females are drab because they do not need to compete for males. Males are bright and ostentatious because females are in demand and can afford to be choosy. The reason female birds of paradise are in demand is that eggs are a more scarce resource than sperms. What has happened in modern western man? Has the male really become the sought-after sex, the one that is in demand, the sex that can afford to be choosy? If so, why?

If I were to list all the positive attributes about Ryan Lilly, I’d run out of superior adjectives to use. I mean seriously, how big do you think my vocabulary is? I only know about a hundred million words, and with that small of a sample size, how could I accurately describe someone as great as Ryan? Ryan is the most amazing guy I’ve ever met. Seriously, I’m insanely jealous and I just want to stab him. But I won’t, because everybody loves Ryan, including me. Ryan is a big inspiration in my life. Not only is Ryan fiercely intelligent—on the level of Newton, da Vinci, and Nietzsche’s mustache—but he is the most open, honest, and understanding guy I’ve ever met. He’s the kind of guy who’d give you the shirt off his back if you asked. I know, because I’m wearing his shirt now. If you don’t know who Ryan Lilly is, you soon will. He’ll probably be one of the most talked about people in history, and just the other day I came across this quote from Pliny (I don’t know how old Pliny is, so I don’t know if it was Pliny the Older or Pliny the Younger) which said, “Everything good I have written about can be summed up in two words: Ryan Lilly.” That’s a real quote I read in a real book. Trust me, I’m a writer.

It doesn’t matter what they think. Dance with me.” He took her hand, and for the first time in a long while, she felt safe. He pulled her to the center of the floor and into the motions of the dance. Ronan didn’t speak for a few moments, then touched a slim braid that curved in a tendril along Kestrel’s cheek. “This is pretty.” The memory of Arin’s hands in her hair made her stiffen. “Gorgeous?” Ronan tried again. “Transcendent? Kestrel, the right adjective hasn’t been invented to describe you.” She attempted a light tone. “What will ladies do, when this kind of exaggerated flirtation is no longer the fashion? We shall be spoiled.” “You know it’s not mere flirtation,” Ronan said. “You’ve always known.” And Kestrel had, it was true that she had, even if she hadn’t wanted to shake the knowledge out of her mind and look at it, truly see it. She felt a dull spark of dread. “Marry me, Kestrel.” She held her breath. “I know things have been hard lately,” Ronan continued, “and that you don’t deserve it. You’ve had to be so strong, so proud, so cunning. But all of this unpleasantness will go away the instant we announce our engagement. You can be yourself again.” But she was strong. Proud. Cunning. Who did he think she was, if not the person who mercilessly beat him at every Bite and Sting game, who gave him Irex’s death-price and told him exactly what to do with it? Yet Kestrel bit back her words. She leaned into the curve of his arm. It was easy to dance with him. It would be easy to say yes. “Your father will be happy. My wedding gift to you will be the finest piano the capital can offer.” Kestrel glanced into his eyes. “Or keep yours,” he said hastily. “I know you’re attached to it.” “It’s just…you are very kind.” He gave a short, nervous laugh. “Kindness has little to do with it.” The dance slowed. It would end soon. “So?” Ronan had stopped, even though the music continued and dancers swirled around them. “What…well, what do you think?” Kestrel didn’t know what to think. Ronan was offering everything she could want. Why, then, did his words sadden her? Why did she feel like something had been lost? Carefully, she said, “The reasons you’ve given aren’t reasons to marry.” “I love you. Is that reason enough?” Maybe. Maybe it would have been. But as the music drained from the air, Kestrel saw Arin on the fringes of the crowd. He watched her, his expression oddly desperate. As if he, too, were losing something, or it was already lost. She saw him and didn’t understand how she had ever missed his beauty. How it didn’t always strike her as it did now, like a blow. “No,” Kestrel whispered. “What?” Ronan’s voice cut into the quiet. “I’m sorry.” Ronan swiveled to find the target of Kestrel’s gaze. He swore. Kestrel walked away, pushing past slaves bearing trays laden with glasses of pale gold wine. The lights and people blurred in her stinging eyes. She walked through the doors, down a hall, out of the palace, and into the cold night, knowing without seeing or hearing or touching him that Arin was at her side.

Two weeks ago my mountain of mail delivered forth a pipsqueak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story “The Fog Horn” in a high school reader. In my story, I had described a lighthouse as hav­ing, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was a “God-Light.” Looking up at it from the view-point of any sea-creature one would have felt that one was in “the Presence.” The editors had deleted “God-Light” and “in the Presence.” Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count ‘em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book? Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito—out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch—gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer—lost! Every story, slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like—in the finale—Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been ra­zored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant’s attention—shot dead. Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture? How did I react to all of the above? By “firing” the whole lot. By sending rejection slips to each and every one. By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.

He did not know that they were people, nor that he was a bear. Indeed, he did not know that he existed at all: everything that is represented by the words I and Me and Thou was absent from his mind. When Mrs. Maggs gave him a tin of golden syrup, as she did every Sunday morning, he did not recognize either a giver or a recipient. Goodness occurred and he tasted it. And that was all. Hence his loves might, if you wished, be all described as cupboard loves: food and warmth, hands that caressed, voices that reassured, were their objects. But if by a cupboard love you meant something cold or calculating you would be quite misunderstanding the real quality of the beast’s sensations. He was no more like a human egoist than he was like a human altruist. There was no prose in his life. The appetencies which a human mind might disdain as cupboard loves were for him quivering and ecstatic aspirations which absorbed his whole being, infinite yearnings, stabbed with the threat of tragedy and shot through with the color of Paradise. One of our race, if plunged back for a moment in the warm, trembling, iridescent pool of that pre-Adamite consciousness, would have emerged believing that he had grasped the absolute: for the states below reason and the states above it have, by their common contrast to the life we know, a certain superficial resemblance. Sometimes there returns to us from infancy the memory of a nameless delight or terror, unattached to any delightful or dreadful thing, a potent adjective floating in a nounless void, a pure quality. At such moments we have experience of the shallows of that pool. But fathoms deeper than any memory can take us, right down in the central warmth and dimness, the bear lived all its life.

Perhaps the first or dominant adjective that scholars of comparative mysticism use to describe what they mean by mystical experience is unitive. There’s no one way to unpack what they are getting at. To have a mystical or personal religious experience is to feel oneself connected with, part of, united with, aware of, one with, Something or Some-activity larger than oneself. One feels transported beyond one’s usual sense of self as one grows aware of an expanded self, or a loss of self, in the discovery of something beyond words. Philosopher of religion John Hick describes mystical experience as the shift from self-centeredness to Other-centeredness or Reality-centeredness. Certainly, our description of Buddhist Enlightenment squares with this unitive characteristic of mysticism, even though Buddhists, while strong on loss of self, use deliberately slippery terms for what they’re connected with: Emptiness, Groundlessness, InterBeing. Christian mystics, on the other hand, are very clear about what they are united with. Christian mystical literature abounds with expressions such as “one with Christ,” “temples of the Holy Spirit,” “the Body of Christ,” “Spouses of Christ,” the “Divine indwelling,” “participants in the divine nature.

What types of looks are you drawn to in others? What is your current go-to outfit, and what do you love about it? Do you consider yourself more modest, or do you like to push boundaries? What three adjectives would you use to describe the spirit that you want your clothes to help you embody? (fiery, serious, warm, and so on) What accessories do you gravitate toward? What colors inspire you? Are there particular brands that you love? What celebrity or influencer style speaks to you most? Which parts of your body do you want to accentuate?

Here's the key: only use adjectives when something is out of the ordinary.

Backed by a small but growing group of loyalists, Gingrich launched an insurgency aimed at instilling a more combative approach in the party. Taking advantage of a new media technology, C-SPAN, Gingrich “used adjectives like rocks,” deliberately employing over-the-top rhetoric. He described Congress as “corrupt” and “sick.” He questioned his Democratic rivals’ patriotism. He even compared them to Mussolini and accused them of trying to “destroy our country.” According to former Georgia state Democratic Party leader Steve Anthony, “the things that came out of Gingrich’s mouth…we had never [heard] that before from either side. Gingrich went so far over the top that the shock factor rendered the opposition frozen for a few years.

loud chanting and hooting is heard at the opera (along with the visual spectacle of audience attire such as jeans, message T-shirts, and sweats worn at such a formal art presentation); the exquisite and complex language of English is peppered with the word “like” every third or fourth word; the repetitive use of the adjective “cool” as a positive evaluation of everything remotely good reflects a paucity of vocabulary; and if the taste of strawberry ice cream is “awesome,” then what word is left to describe the aurora borealis? In

From seven hundred journalists at the beginning of March, the number had dwindled to about one hundred and fifty—print reporters, TV correspondents, photographers, cameramen, and support personnel. At the press center I encountered Kazem, who only a week before I had asked for help with my visa. “Why are you staying when everyone else is leaving?” he asked. I took a chance and replied in Arabic. Some journalists, I said, are as samid as the Iraqi people. Samid means “steadfast” and “brave” and is the adjective most often used by Iraqis to describe themselves. Kazem laughed and threw his arm around my shoulder.

He wasn't an automaton; he was in many ways - and observers often noticed it and chose the defining adjective - a kind man. Kindness is a quality that is often overlooked beside the noisier virtues and sins. But without it humanity loses something essential to itself: a deeply human quality, maybe even a defining quality - the humane. (Describing Carl Sylvius Volkner)

It is fatty, salty, briny, buttery, bright, sweet, smoky, sour and just about every adjective you could use to describe something delicious.

And the rejection of white working-class voters as desirable partners betrays an ugly elitism that is at odds with what Democrats are supposed to stand for. The disdain was made explicit in 2016 when Hillary Clinton described half of Trump supporters as “deplorables.”84 Although Clinton was certainly right to denounce racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes as deplorable, her comments were troubling on several levels. She changed what is normally an adjective into a noun, suggesting that white working-class people with less education than her were completely defined by their attitudes on race. Clinton used the line while speaking to audiences whom she described as “successful people” at fundraisers in the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard, where her audiences knowingly chuckled at America’s benighted white working class.85 And it did not go unnoticed, one journalist remarked, that deplorables is not a term Clinton ever applied to highly educated Wall Street bankers who brought about the Great Recession and threw millions of people out of work.86 In

Did it help?” He sounds interested, so I answer honestly. “Not really. I still felt like shit, I just had better adjectives to describe it.

When someone is diagnosed with depression, you won’t hear them say, “I am depression.” This is equally unlikely with a patient diagnosed with anorexia or bipolar disorder or even schizophrenia. A rare few psychiatric conditions enjoy the pleasure of being both an adjective describing one’s mood or classification of behaviors and a noun—a label—to encompass all of who one is. Alcoholics. Addicts. And borderlines. Unfortunately for me, I identify with all of these conditions.

Maybe I just wanted to spend time with a pretty, crazy American.” “Did you call me pretty? Or was that a qualifier for the adjective crazy?” “It was not a qualifier. It was two separate adjectives, both of which accurately describe you. Although after the knife incident, I believe crazy is coming through stronger.

You can’t have your own pronouns any more than you can have your own adjectives. Those words refer to an objective reality about a person that can’t be changed through our subjective preferences. Through hard work, we can change adjectives that describe some parts of our appearance, but whether a person is a “he” or a “she” is a biological reality. It is inscribed in every cell of our body—it is something, contrary to what our culture claims, that cannot be ignored in favor of our own preferences.

Careless is the first adjective that comes to mind when describing the rich in this novel. The dream they embody is an alloyed dream that destroys whoever tries to get close to it.

When a woman is described in conversation, it is quite likely that her sexual attractiveness, or lack of it, will be prominently mentioned. This is true, whether the speaker is a man or a woman. When a man is described, the adjectives used are much more likely to have nothing to do with sex.

Naïveté was in fact warmly embraced. It proved a useful alternative to describing an action or statement as ingenuous, an adjective which contemporary users were apt to confuse with ingenious.19

Vivid, exact, concrete, accurate, dense, rich: these adjectives describe a prose that is crowded with sensations, meanings, and implications.

Sometime you don't need to put complement with your adjectives let your adjective describe everything

Loving Angel was the greatest gift. Adventerous. Special. Thrilling. Astonishing. There were more adjectives than I could come up with to describe being in love.

When you hear a Spanish cook describe a paella or a cake, you realize she’s using a much richer repertoire of adjectives than what one of us would use to characterize a book or an important experience.

You Set The Pace Because of the woman she was, our friend in Proverbs 31 had a home that exuded a good atmosphere, making it a place people wanted to frequent. Every home has an atmosphere. Maybe you don’t know what the atmosphere of your home is, but there are some who do – the people who frequent it. How would you describe the atmosphere in your home? Pick an adjective: Warm, peaceful, loving, cheerful, united? How about anxious, bitter, contentious, or frustrated? It is the woman in each home who creates the atmosphere. She is like the hub of the wheel around which the home revolves. Have you ever noticed how quickly your husband and children pick up your moods? When you’re grumpy, your husband seems to come home grumpy, too, and your children pick up that mood the second they come in from school. Then you wonder what is the matter with them! Try it tonight. An experiment in terror. Be a real first-class Oscar the Grouch at dinnertime, and see how long it takes the others to follow suit. Better yet, be the woman God wants you to be, and see how fast they respond positively!

What are the key elements for a fabulous, well-delivered compliment? You . . . • are sincere and genuine. • give it freely without expecting anything in return. Your compliment is a selfless gift, not a boomerang. • are specific and detailed. • elaborate on why you like something. • describe how their positive virtue has positively impacted you. • can use adjectives for more colorful descriptions. • keep it positive. • say it like you mean it with intentional impact. • use discretion and good judgment. • leave no room for misinterpretation or misunderstanding. • say the right thing at the right moment and let it flow organically. Finding sincere ways to compliment others is a powerful way to make a great first and last impression.

Adding kat after an adjective creates a compound word. The Wolof adjective hipi describes someone who is open-eyed and hyper-aware. A hipi-kat, therefore, is a person who is on the ball, or a “hepcat.

I hope it is not necessary for me to stress the platonic nature of that relationship—not platonic in the purist sense, there was no philosophical discourse, but we certainly didn’t fuck, which is usually what people mean by platonic; which I bet would really piss Plato off, that for all his thinking and chatting his name has become an adjective for describing sexless trysts.

When deployed in rap vernacular, the word villain feels slightly anachronistic, particularly when prefaced by the adjective mother-fuckin’. It’s a little old-timey. But there simply wasn’t a word that better described N.W.A’s public aspirations with such accuracy. I suppose gangsta is the only other word that came close, a modifier so flexible it could even be used to describe how rappers operated their cars. If you lowered the seat and tilted your body toward the vehicle’s passenger side, the posture was referred to as the “gangsta lean.” Spawned in 1972 by forgotten R&B wunderkind William DeVaughn, “gangsta lean” is an amazingly evocative term, particularly to those who did not initially know what it meant. But once you unpacked the definition, it merely outlined a villainous way to drive your jalopy to White Castle, operating from the position that appearing villainous was an important way to appear at all possible times. This was very, very important to the members of N.W.A. It was the only thing they seemed to worry about. Everything they attempted had to possess criminal undertones. I can only assume they spent hours trying to deduce villainous ways to microwave popcorn (and if they’d succeeded, there would absolutely be a song about it, assumedly titled “Pop Goes the Corn Killa” or “45 Seconds to Bitch Snack”).

The problem with intensifying an image only by adjectives, as you can see from these examples, is that adjectives encourage cliché. It’s hard to think of adjective descriptors that haven’t been overused: bulging or ropy muscles; clean-cut good looks; frizzy hair. If you use an adjective to describe a physical attribute, make sure the phrase is not only accurate and sensory but fresh. In “Flowering Judas,” Katherine Anne Porter describes Braggioni’s singing voice as a “furry, mournful voice” that takes the high notes “in a prolonged painful squeal.” Often, the easiest way to avoid an adjective-based cliché is to free the phrase entirely from its adjective modifier. For example, rather than describing her eyes merely as “hazel,” Emily Dickinson remarked that they were “the color of the sherry the guests leave in the glasses.” Making

It’s one thing to be afraid of ISIS and their terrorist methods. But how do you deal with the terror of a family member you can’t trust? Or are you just plain paranoid? That’s the other side of the domestic thriller. Maybe the evil that resides inside your own home doesn’t exist at all. Perhaps it’s just a figment of your imagination. Perhaps the evil resides entirely within. One thing that’s for certain, domestic thrillers are always described with adjectives like, “gripping,” “riveting,” “page turner,” “disturbing,” and of course, “horrifying.” They also provide us with something that other varieties of thriller cannot. They make us question our own personal belief in right versus wring. In a word, we can relate on a personal level to domestic thrillers. And that’s what scares us the most.

When I am working with groups of thirty or fewer people, there is a powerful name exercise that I do to break the ice, start with humor, and begin my program with positive energy. One by one, each person will introduce themselves using an adjective that describes their personality that starts with the first letter of their name. “Spontaneous Susan,” “Dependable Dave,” and “Happy Helen” are a few quick examples. The benefit for the participants is twofold: it makes each person feel good and it makes people laugh. Additionally, it enables me to learn their names so that I can integrate them into the entire presentation for full engagement and participation.

Have you ever noticed how many adjectives you have to describe your intellect?” “Not nearly enough. The dictionary should have more words for expressing its vastness.

I am a proud father in the fulfillment I feel when I provide guidance to my son. We have tremendous sharing together, which I now share in words with you today, with only a humble choice of adjectives to truly describe the emotions I feel arising from my relationship with my son. I imagine each of us has relationships of which we can be proud.

The adjectives Pearce and Newton chose to describe the everyday life of mother and child are “phobic,” “psychotic,” and “miserable”; common nouns in the text are “anger,” “jealousy,” and “blackmail”; their favorite verbs are “handicap,” “paralyze,” “destroy,” and “atrophy.

That's what you wanted an adjective for? Cobwebs?" She was, predictably, again at his elbow. "Cobwebs cannot be dodgy." “Why in hell not? I certainly try to dodge them.” “Yes, you are doing the dodging. But you’ve modified the cobwebs to be of questionable character, which they aren’t. Now the whole sentence reads wrong— it’s supposed to be eerie, nearly spectral⁠—” “Fine.” He set down the composing stick and flattened his palms on the worktable. “I’ll rephrase. I need a four- or five-word adjective to describe morally upstanding cobwebs that does not detract from the spectral nature of the magistrate’s moonlit study.

"That's what you wanted an adjective for? Cobwebs?" She was, predictably, again at his elbow. "Cobwebs cannot be dodgy." “Why in hell not? I certainly try to dodge them.” “Yes, you are doing the dodging. But you’ve modified the cobwebs to be of questionable character, which they aren’t. Now the whole sentence reads wrong— it’s supposed to be eerie, nearly spectral⁠—” “Fine.” He set down the composing stick and flattened his palms on the worktable. “I’ll rephrase. I need a four- or five-word adjective to describe morally upstanding cobwebs that does not detract from the spectral nature of the magistrate’s moonlit study.

The worst part about the censorship regime was that it was maddeningly arbitrary. Books that circulated for years might be banned without warning. Customs officials might declare a book legal only to have the Post Office issue its own ban. A judge or jury could acquit a book one day and condemn it the next, and the wording of the statues themselves stoked confusion. The New York law described criminal literature with what Ernst called the "six deadly adjectives": obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent and disgusting—lawmakers kept adding words when they updated the law. Multiplying the number of adjectives was a way of papering over the elusiveness of any given designation. What was the difference between obscene and lascivious? If a judge seemed reluctant to find something lewd, a prosecutor could argue that it was disgusting—and every one of those adjectives was subjective.

...they had just used the word hidoi, a Japanese adjective most often used to describe civil wars, natural disasters, or serial killers, and applied it to my shoes. The dress shoes I wore weren’t high-end or anything, but I’d like to think that hidoi was an exaggeration.

In drafting Side Affects, other trans folks have told me over and over how relatable a book about, as I describe it in shorthand, "being trans and feeling bad" is. but I have also had many folks ask me why I choose to dwell on negative affect rather than, say, the experience of so-called gender euphoria experienced by subjects when their correct pronouns are used or when they engage in some kind of gender-affirming activity. [...] and I definitely can't pretend that the cultivation of happiness makes any sense at all as a political aim. If and when I feel something akin to gender euphoria, it's surprising, dependent off actors well beyond my own agency, and also somewhat predictably predicated on axes of privilege that structure my quotidian experience. Moreover, it doesn't last. [...] the opening line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: all happy families are the same, they say, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. What they mean by this is that happiness is not actually all that interesting: there's nothing there to process, nothing there to illuminate, nothing that's particularly mysterious, enigmatic, confusing, or complex. Happiness is nice, that most lukewarm of adjectives, and in its niceness, it is also banal. They're saying, in these moments, that it's alright that we'll be processing trauma for the rest of our lives; it's to be expected, and it's from and through that collective processing that we'll be most able to approximate anything close to radical transformation, anything that remotely resembles healing. The only way around it is straight through.

But my sleep was ragged that night, she wrote. But she didn’t know anything about ragged sleep when she wrote that. She knew the word ragged and she knew it was an adjective that could describe many things, including sleep, but she knew nothing about ragged sleep. Nowadays she is shocked by the fraudulence of words. Every word claims an authority and every word craves to be believed, and we read others’ words and we find something to relate to, solace in a shared experience. Yet there doesn’t have to be any experience behind a word. A word can be a shadow not cast by any object.

Transgender is an adjective that describes people whose gender identity differs from the gender they were assigned at birth.

Sweet would be the last adjective I’d use to describe him. Arrogant. Despicable. Passive-aggressive. But no, sweet didn’t even cross my mind.