When it comes to adjectives, editors love to quote Mark Twain, who is said to have told a young writer, “When you catch an adjective, kill it.” The language maven Ben Yagoda even used that quote as the title of a grammar book (which is quite good, BTW). Some writing coaches I know tell their clients to scrub the adjectives from their paragraphs.

But hang on! Adjectives make up an important class of words in our language (unlike, say, prepositions, which hardly inspire awe). Linguists rank adjectives right up there with nouns, verbs, and adverbs as one of the four major word classes in English. Each of these classes plays a different lead role in the drama of a sentence: nouns are the actors, verbs are the actions, adverbs give the actions shape, and adjectives give us a clearer sense of the actors.

Adjectives, used discreetly, make descriptions come alive. Take Jonathan Raban’s “deep episcopal purple,” which describes the color of the sky as the sun sets over a barren landscape in his book Bad Land. What a fresh way to describe such a cliché subject!  “Episcopal” names an exact shade of purple (the color of a bishop’s cassock, or a priest’s vestments on particular holy days). It also subtly spins a thread between the sunset and a religious experience in the reader’s mind.

The most evocative adjectives leave room for the reader’s imagination, allowing different associations and interpretations, without departing from the writer’s overall idea.

The real danger in using an adjective—and really any word—is overusing it until it loses its oomph, until it cannot paint a picture of its subject (or even touch the brush to the canvas). Arthur Plotnik has written an entire book on tantalizing adjectives of praise precisely because of the ones that make his skin crawl: great, fabulous, and terrific, along with their cousins amazing, awesome, and unbelievable. Called Better Than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives,  the book lists—starting with “all-bets-off best” and ending with “zhooshy”—the most mind-marmalizing, wit-sharpening, noodle-frying, brains-into-putty astonishing adjectives.

(Here’s a WBUR interview about the book.)

Of course, some situations call for more subtle superlatives. William Carlos Williams’ red wheelbarrow next to the white chickens in his famous poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” gets at an image by appealing to the reader’s senses. Nothing actually happens in the poem; the point is to transport you to this scene. Without the simple adjectives conveying color, the poem wouldn’t be able to take you there.  

Then there are the “angelheaded hipsters” from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. He crafted an adjective from two nouns to describe denizens of San Francisco, “burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.”

What adjectives have knocked your socks off? Add a comment. I will send a copy of Better Than Great as a reward for the most zhooshy example.

 {And thanks to poet Ava Sayaka Rosen, who lent her favorite examples to this post.}

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1. Pompous Ass Words