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.}

Let me tell you about something I saw last night. Eighteen men and women, all lightly dressed in summer white, lay on a proscenium stage. From the floor, 36 naked hands bent at right angles from 36 wrists and wriggled up, each at a slightly different pace. Let me make sure you’ve got the picture: 36 splayed palms with urgently curled fingertips, turning clockwise and counterclockwise, clockwise and counterclockwise—as if working the lids of enormous and invisible upside-down jars—and at the same time lifting slowly, pushed upwards by long, lithe, tendril-like arms.

Just to give you a sense of the oddness of the image, these naked, floating, turning palms rose from a stage deep in the heart of Boston (in a building with crystal chandeliers, ruby damask walls, curving staircases, and gold-leaf everywhere) and deep in the heart of winter (on a night whose 17-degree cold plummeted to a wind-chill factor in the aughts).

I was watching Mozart Dances, by the Mark Morris Dance Group, and my imagination was being lifted and loosened like those imaginary glass jars.

Upstage, a backdrop was turned into a giant canvas, covered with enormous watercolor brushstrokes—one part mad child making fingerpaintings, one part mad giant making like Motherwell.

The dances were sometimes balletic, sometimes modern, always surprising: pliés, bourées, jetés, and attitudes, but all done barefoot, barelimbed, and with ironic twists: arms floating up all pretty, then squeaking into something angular and awkward; a circle dance suggesting Matisse, then flattening into the Virginia Reel; languid ballerinas freezing into Egyptian vase ornaments, a butterfly morphing into an insect, a bird into a mechanical doll, a corsair into a sailor cruising the street. The lyric vocabulary of ballet devolved into the vernacular, the poetic turned pedestrian.

What did any of this have to do with writing?

As I headed back out into the bitter cold, I thought about Mark Morris’s creative instincts. He never lets himself cross over into cliché, and he plants, plays with, and then supplants our expectations. His language is always surprising, fresh, and funny. I can’t get that one image out of my head, the palms floating up from the floor. They are terribly close to something I’ve seen before, yet remain completely unfamiliar: Sperm, propelled by wriggling tails? Lily pads, levitating out of the swamp and dancing on their stems? Lima beans, sprouting up into the air rather than up through the dirt? Periscopes, pushing up through water and taking a look around?

Images organic, evocative, surreal. And entirely original.

I mentioned earlier that I’m auditing an English class at Harvard taught by literary critic James Wood. We’ve so far muscled our way through Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, V. S. Naipaul, and Henry Green. Now we are reading Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill. It’s an inspiring read in all sorts of ways, but one thing I noticed right away was the Irish-Turk-sort-of-American writer’s use of metaphors.

Take this description, right at the beginning of the book, written in the voice of the Dutch narrator: “It was the kind of barbarously sticky American afternoon that made me yearn for the shadows case by scooting summer clouds in northern Europe, yearn even for those days when you play cricket wearing two sweaters under a cold sky patched here and there by a blue tatter—enough to make a sailor’s pants, as my mother used to say.”

The sky is one of the hardest things to describe in a fresh way. Think of all those “rosy-fingered dawns” and “skies red enough to delight a sailor.”  Yet so many scenes must include a description of the sky! Here are some others that have impressed me:

“More than half the short winter’s day had passed while they were in the warehouse. The sky was a blue so pale that it was almost no color; wooded bluffs loomed above them, beyond the industrial estate, marking the edge of the city. The sun had dropped behind the bluffs already, so that the tops of the bare trees showed up finely spiky, like hair or fur, against a yellow flow of light from somewhere out of sight. While they waited, their breath began to fog up the car windows.” (From the short story “Friendly Fire,” by Tessa Hadley in The New Yorker, Feb. 4, 2008)

“Overhead, the sky is the color of a peacock’s breast, shimmery, nearly metallic blue. Towards the east, the drape of night is beginning to close over us, highlighting the days’ lingering colors. The blue overhead fades westward into a dramatic periwinkle, which in turn gives way to an intense lavender dissolving into a brilliant fuchsia horizon. A few hundred yards in the distance, the great fountain, already lit by yellow lights, glows, the enormous ancient plane tress that line the Cours Mirabeau, in their stark winter nakedness just two days ago, are covered now with tiny buds, like stars in the fading light.” (From “The Provençal Sky,” by Michele Anna Jordan in Travelers’ Tales Provence.)

“In the early evening, high-altitude clouds in the western sky formed a thin yellow wash which became richer over the hour, and then thickened until a filtered orange glow hung above the giant crests of parkland trees; the leaves became nutty brown, the branches glimpsed among the foliage oily black, and the desiccated grasses tool on the colors of the sky. A Fauvist dedicated to improbable color might have imagined a landscape this way, especially once sky and ground took on a reddish bloom and the swollen trunks of elderly oaks became so black they began to look blue.” (From the opening of Chapter Eight in Atonement, by Ian McEwan, published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.)

Three of these four examples are from fiction, but I’d be willing to bet that the authors spent a lot of time looking at real skies and a lot of time figuring out how to put the images into words. Nonfiction writers can do the same attentive looking and the same imaginative reckoning.

Do you have a favorite? Add it here.