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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 headwords 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, contumelious and cunctative, diaphanous and disingenuous, ebullient and edacious, 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 umbrageous, verecund and veridical, waspish and willful, and xylophagous, yeasty, and zaftig. And these, of course, are just some of the golden adjectives 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 DanielMurphy to write various volumes on grammar and language. In both these disciplines he and I were encouraged to reveal our knowledge 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 Columbia University.
At that time, pompous English teachers were fond of telling their callow 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 announcements? Because we belonged to the generation that recognized Ernest Hemingway as supreme novelistic authority. Ours was the generation 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 redivivus? Eschew modifiers.
Readers long have been interested in the strength of the English language 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 Extraordinarily 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 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 dictionary. 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 dictionary, 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 adjectives -- not the entire list of adjectives known to exist, of course, but those golden adjectives I consider to be of greatest interest and possible usefulness for readers, writers, and students. This chance to write about adjectives 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 Extraordinarily 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, definitions, and examples of usage. Finally, words related in meaning to the headwords are supplied, classified, and pronounced.
Eugene Ehrlich
April 4, 2002
The Highly Selective Dictionary of Golden Adjectives for the Extraordinarily Literate. Copyright © by Eugene Ehrlich. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
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