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.}

You see it in Strunk and White, you see in bibles on good writing, and you even see it in essays on this Web site: the command to use Anglo-Saxon words instead of Latin ones. In response I’ll use a very non-Anglo-Saxon word: hogwash!

Where did this meme start, and have the people who spread it really studied the history of English?

Let’s go back, way back, before the birth of Greenwich Mean Time…. The first people to arrive on the island we now call Britain were the Celts (also called the Britons). They were soon joined by Scots, Picts, and some Latin dudes who wandered over from the Roman Empire. Then, round about the fifth century, the Germanic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived from the continent, through what are now known as Holland, Germany, and Denmark.

These barbarous tribes brought with them the seax (a terrifying blade from which the Saxons got their name) and a language that had been mixing it up with Latin for centuries. As linguist David Crystal points out in The Stories of English, the vocabulary of English “has never been purely Anglo-Saxon, even in its Anglo-Saxon period”!

Anglo-Saxon did eventually form the basic stock of Old English, enlivened with a smattering of Celtic and Latin words. St. Augustine brought new ingredients from Rome, Danes added some sustenance of their own, and then the Normans spiced things up with French and more Latin. By the time of Shakespeare, English was a rich verbal stew—then the Bard added all kinds of coinages to the pot.

That didn’t stop early language mavens from craving a pure, purée-smooth English. In the sixteenth century, John Cheke suggested that words with Latin and Greek origins be replaced by words with Old English roots, and in the nineteenth, authors like Dickens and Hardy sang the virtues of an all-Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. In the twentieth century, George Orwell took up the banner, arguing in “Politics and the English Language” that “bad writers are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin and Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.” In other words, good writers don’t rely on words with Latin roots (or, for that matter, any non-Germanic roots).

Orwell’s point—and it’s a fine one—was that straightforward, punchy words should trump pompous, polysyllabic ones. Point taken. And it’s true that a lot of obtuse abstractions (ameliorate, disintermediation, subaqueous) have Latin roots. Second point taken. But here’s the thing: English has always borrowed nice, crisp, short, specific words from other languages. Of the following 24 words, can you tell which are Germanic in origin and which ones were snatched from Latin: belt, bin, cat, cook, craft, cup, day, dog, earth, god, gold, home, light, pan, pit, pot, red, sack, sock, stop, sun, wall, wife, work? See the answers here.)

And what’s the matter with early imports from Scandinavia (cake, crooked, dregs), France (bacon, ginger, proud), and Frisia, aka Holland before it was Holland (island)? (Props to David Crystal for most of my examples.)

Today 80 percent of our vocabulary comes from “foreign” sources, including these perfectly good if very un-Anglo-Saxon words: ballot (from Italian), banshee (Scots Gaelic), bungalow (Hindi), garage (French), gong (Javanese), goulash (Hungarian), junta (Spanish), kahuna (Hawaiian), kiosk (Turkish), llama (Quechua), marmalade (Portuguese), mentsh (Yiddish), robot (Czech), slim (Dutch), sofa (Arabic), tomato (Nahuatl), tycoon (Japanese), window (Old Icelandic), yen (as in desire, Chinese).

The next time someone tells you to “prefer the Anglo-Saxon,” offer to edit his or her copy with a well-sharpened seax.

I’m excited to announce that I just sold a proposal for a new book to W. W. Norton. This one will do for verbs what Sin and Syntax does for sentences. Here’s how I described it in the proposal:

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Caesar got ‘em. Matthew got ‘em. Bellow got ‘em. Even E. B. Farnum and my dog got ‘em.

Got what?

Verbs.

Vital, vibrant, voluptuous, and, yes, sometimes vexing verbs.

Caesar proclaimed “veni, vidi, vinci.” Matthew reminded, “And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not.” Bellow saw in every face in New York “the refinement of one particular motive or essence—I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want.”

Deadwood’s mayor E. B. Farnum, when he saw the Widow Garret, said, “She enters,” rather than the “There she is” of lesser mortals. And my dog? Well, you’d better believe that Homer understood the commands “sit,” “stay,” “heel,” and “fetch.” (He wasn’t so good on “lie down.”)

Verbs have been called everything from “action words” to “the heartbeat of a sentence.” They have even been called The Almighty—by Buckminster Fuller:  “God, to me, it seems, is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper.” Verbs make the fulcrum of every sentence, the essence of any story. They put action in scenes, show eccentricity in characters, and convey drama in plots.

Knowing the difference between a paltry verb and a potent one, a static sentence and a dynamic one, the passive voice and the active one, means knowing how to write purposefully and powerfully. In fact, understanding the verb means understanding English itself, for in English more than in other tongues, verbs enjoy a kind of primacy. Think about it: The word itself comes from the Latin verbum, for “word.” We can’t verbalize without verbs, nor can we boast of verbal dexterity!

Yet, for all their primacy and vibrancy, verbs are mostly misunderstood and often misused. Vex, Hex, Smash, and Smooch aims to change the way we think about verbs—and about language itself.

Beginning writers often ask me: “What is the one thing that will improve my work?” Aside from the obvious answer—read more, write more—I tell them to bone up on verbs.

Vex, Hex will take writers from the basics (static and dynamic verbs) to the esoteric (the indicative, the imperative, and the oh so subjunctive). It will set writers straight on objects and why it’s easy to use who and whom correctly. It upends conventional notions of verbs, sentences, and literature itself, marching from Caesar to Sorenson, from Woolf to The Wolfman, from Dickens to Didion, from Hemingway to JFK. And we won’t forget rappers like Dr. Dre, or TV writers like David Milch (Deadwood) and David Simon (The Wire).

Vex, Hex also helps writers reinterpret the old rules for the new media landscape. The books show how verbs figure into the 140-character messages of Twitter and how they can elevate blogs into literature. (Or at least something worth reading.) This is a book for every writer trying to figure out how to rise above the digital din by crafting prose that is lean, powerful, and punchy.

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Doesn’t it sound like fun? Look for it in fall 2011. In the meantime, I’ll be creating a page here and inviting you to send in your favorite examples of writers who get verbs and how to use them to perk up their prose.