The Highly Selective Dictionary of Golden Adjectives

271 Pages·2003·3.018 MB·English

by  Eugene Ehrich

The
Highly Selective

Dictionary

of
G o l d e n

Adjectives

for the
Extraordinarily Literate

Eugene Ehrlich
Contents



Preface
Pronunciation Notes
Pronunciation Key
The Dictionary
A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I,
J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R,
S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z
Acknowledgments
About the Author
By Eugene Ehrlich
Credit
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
PREFACE



Something there is in the hearts of teachers and critics of English that
finds adjectives the most detestable elements of the language and the
most easily excised. Yet, even a brief examination of some of the head-
words in the dictionary before you suggests the magnificence of more or
less useful English words that are classified as adjectives and enable you
to exploit the richness of tone and shades of meaning awaiting your
readers.
Consider, for example, what you and other writers would do without
the likes of adventitious and aleatory, baleful and banausic, contume-
lious and cunctative, diaphanous and disingenuous, ebullient and eda-
cious, factitious and fatidic, gestic and gnathonic, halcyon and
heuristic, iatrogenic and impuissant, jejune and jocund, kempt and
knurled, lambent and Laodicean, magniloquent and marmoreal,
nescient and niveous, obdurate and officious, Panglossian and
Paphian, quaquaversal and quixotic, redolent and refulgent, sacerdotal
and Sisyphean, temerarious and truculent, ulotrichous and umbra-
geous, verecund and veridical, waspish and willful, and xylophagous,
yeasty, and zaftig. And these, of course, are just some of the golden adjec-
tives you will meet in this book.
Adjectives have long had bad press in some quarters, and I believe the
fault lies with traditional teachers of English. Read on.
Many years have passed since I first teamed up with my colleague
Daniel Murphy to write various volumes on grammar and language. In
both these disciplines he and I were encouraged to reveal our knowledge
xi / Preface
and skills to readers as well as to our students. Dan was at Baruch College
of the City University and I was at the School of General Studies at Co-
lumbia University.
At that time, pompous English teachers were fond of telling their cal-
low students, “Adjectives are the enemy of nouns, and adverbs are the
enemy of everything else.” I had of course heard this maxim before and
believed it without question.
But why did Murphy and I support the advice of such grand an-
nouncements? Because we belonged to the generation that recognized
Ernest Hemingway as supreme novelistic authority. Ours was the genera-
tion in which every English teacher worth his deprived prose was telling
students wholesale that Hemingway wrote sentences made up solely of
nouns and verbs. Modifiers of any stripe were forbidden. The resulting
student sentences turned out to be starved of punctuation and severely
sparing of word pictures of action, appearance, aspiration, and feeling—
some of the very functions adjectives fulfill especially well.
Having absorbed this attitude from our teachers, we advanced it
among our own students. And the pity to this day is that many of today’s
romantic—even impossibly jaded—teachers of writing persist in giving
their students the same incorrect come-on: Want to be Hemingway redi-
vivus? Eschew modifiers.
Readers long have been interested in the strength of the English lan-
guage and its usefulness in characterizing our aspirations, achievements,
and anxieties. Think of those expressions including the adjective
“golden.” Consider the golden mean, golden handshake, golden bowl,
golden wedding, golden fleece, golden age, among many golden others.
Then we have such less than glorious expressions as goldbrick, fool’s gold,
and the golden calf. All with a distinctive charm, and all gold or golden.
The Highly Selective Dictionary of Golden Adjectives for the Extraordi-
narily Literate offers a compendium of noun modifiers that are golden in
the sense of being “brilliant, exceptionally valuable, advantageous, or
fine,” as suggested in the expression golden opportunity or in the title of
Lewis Mumford’s wonderful literary study The Golden Day. Can there be
anything better than golden?
In this vein, The Highly Selective Dictionary was conceived as a highly
Preface / xii
personal tribute to the most interesting of the words awaiting you to help
adorn, sharpen, and amplify your English sentences. For this is what
adjectives are intended to do. And golden adjectives do this better than
most. How could they not?
The Highly Selective Dictionary is certainly not a permissive dictio-
nary. Permissive dictionaries are excessively tolerant and inclusive of any
words or any spellings that come along. And if people don’t know what a
word means or how it is spelled, such dictionaries make an educated
guess, no matter how misleading.
In contrast, The Highly Selective Dictionary is a prescriptive dictio-
nary, one whose ultimate task is to reward deserving words with inclusion
if they have exhibited plentiful signs of being and remaining useful in our
language. The prescriptive editor attempts to define and spell these words
carefully and conservatively, trying always to tell readers what the selected
words usually mean and how they are most often spelled, and not settle
for what an editor thinks readers may some day believe those words mean.
I consider myself privileged to have selected this list of English adjec-
tives—not the entire list of adjectives known to exist, of course, but those
golden adjectives I consider to be of greatest interest and possible useful-
ness for readers, writers, and students. This chance to write about adjec-
tives provides a third volume of parallel works concerning our language,
which begin with The Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily
Literate and continue with The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extra-
ordinarily Literate, both also published by HarperCollins.
My hope is that readers will find these golden adjectives useful and
entertaining. Thus, each entry begins with an adjectival headword and its
pronunciation, and goes on to offer etymological information, defini-
tions, and examples of usage. Finally, words related in meaning to the
headwords are supplied, classified, and pronounced.
Eugene Ehrlich
April 4, 2002
PRONUNCIATION NOTES



American pronunciation follows few hard-and-fast rules but may vary
from region to region. In pronouncing the headwords of this dictionary, I
have considered all the pronunciations given in standard sources and
then tried to select the most common ones. Even so, some of the pronun-
ciations supplied inevitably indulge the editor’s preferences.
Be advised that in almost every case only one pronunciation is given
for a headword, even though some words commonly have multiple pro-
nunciations. You will find that you cannot go wrong with the single pro-
nunciations given. They are always among the correct pronunciations
given for these words in unabridged dictionaries.
The respelling pronunciation scheme used is almost identical with
the scheme devised for use in my previous Highly Selective books and is
just as easy to use. Each pronunciation is shown in parentheses just after
the headword, and every headword is an adjective, so I have been relieved
of the task of telling you ad nauseam that the headwords all are adjectives.
Fully stressed syllables are shown in CAPITAL LETTERS.
small capital
Syllables that receive secondary stress are shown in
letters
.
Unstressed syllables are shown in lowercase letters, as are pronuncia-
tions of words of one syllable.
Here are three examples of pronounced adjectives:
e
baleful (BAYL-f l)
unkempt (un-KEMPT)
knurled (nurld)
xv / Pronunciation Notes
e
An exception to respelling is use of the schwa ( ), which is defined as
an indistinct or unaccented vowel sound, as in the second syllable of
e e
baleful (BAYL-f l) and the final syllable of ebullient (i-BUUL-y nt).
Such pronunciations, involving use of the schwa, occur only in unac-
cented syllables.
But there are times when not even a schwa is appropriate. This hap-
pens when an “l” or “n” is used alone—whispered, really—to pronounce
a word, or is used in combination with another consonant and can serve
as a syllable without having an accompanying vowel. Consider the word
pay
addlepated, which in this book is pronounced (AD-l- -tid). The “l”
stands alone without even the help of the schwa, for it does not have the
sound of an “l” preceded by a vowel. Consider also the word centripetal,
which is pronounced (sen-TRIP-i-tl), and the word fictile (FIK-tl). No
schwas are needed. Then there are words pronounced with a single “n,”
as in glutton (GLUT-n) and in gluttony (GLUT-n-ee), or an “n” linked
e
with a “t,” as in wanton (WON-tn) and in succedent (s k-SEED-nt).
Another exception to respelling is the use of i, i, and I to indicate long
i
vowel sounds, as in the first syllable of didactic (d-DAK-tik) and the sec-
I i
ond syllable of derisive (di-R -siv). The symbol ¯indicates the sound of a
syllable with secondary stress, but retaining the long vowel sound, as in
the third syllable of dewy-eyed, here pronounced DOO-ee-id.
There are two other exceptions to respelling:
The italicized “th” is used to show the initial sound of words such as
“this” and “thus,” which are given as (this) and (thus). By contrast, in
“thin” and “both,” the sound of th is not italicized. An actual adjective in
I e
the text is blithesome, pronounced (BL TH-s m).
Please note that in the chart that follows, n indicates an n that is only
partially pronounced, as in many words of French origin.
PRONUNCIATION KEY
a as in act, hat, carry
ah as in balm, calm, father
ahr as in far, jar, darling
Pronunciation Notes / xvi
air as in fairy, scare, declare
aw as in audit, walk, gawk, saw
ay as in age, bay, heinous
b as in bake, babble, boob
ch as in choose, church, preach
d as in dare, fuddled, mud
e as in empty, led, berry
ee as in ease, either, meat, see
eer as in ear, eerie, pier, sneer
f as in fin, daffy, belief
g as in gust, bargain, hog
h as in hairy, hot, huddle
hw as in where, whet, anywhere
i as in in, hit, women
i as in bite, light, pie, spy
i¯
as in colonize, sympathize
I as in mighty, lightning, surprise
j as in gin, just, judge, garbage
k as in kerchief, spoken, rack
l as in lag, ladle, sell
m as in many, common, madam
n as in note, knee, manner, napkin
n as in dénouement, frisson, soupçon
ng as in hunger, swinging, bring
o as in opportune, hot, crop
oh as in oppose, most, toast, sew
oo as in oodles, pool, ruler
oor as in poor, tour, sure
or as in aural, border, mortal
ow as in owl, oust, house, allow
oy as in oil, join, boy
p as in print, paper, sleep
r as in rash, tarry, poor
s as in cent, scent, lease, lessen
sh as in sugar, shush, cash
xvii / Pronunciation Notes
t as in talk, utter, heat
th as in think, wrath, loath
th as in then, bother, loathe
u as in ugly, mutter, come
ur as in urge, her, fir, saboteur
uu as in brook, full, woman
v as in very, every, brave
w as in well, awash, allow
y as in yet, abeyance, useful
z as in zap, gazebo, tease
zh as in pleasure, vision, persiflage
Note: Headwords that are considered still to be foreign terms are given in
italics.
Note further: No mention is made in this book of the word “entrepreneur”
or its adjectival form, in hope that one day presidents and CEOs will all
ahn e e
be able to say -tr -pr -NUR or something like it instead of enforcing a
rhyme with “sewer.”