You have to be very particular about adjectives and not use them too creatively for descriptions. Push them into the wrong situation and they can stop meaning anything of consequence.
“Dastardly Chopstick.” Cool, but weird for the sake of weird.
This is an important note to remember for many of the more uncommon adjectives, such as crepuscular. Certain adjectives like that one only fit deservingly with a very select group of nouns. You can’t just throw the word crepuscular around for this or that.
For example, there are just four things to which you should properly ascribe the word runny. Make-up, oil paint, snot, and cheese. If you say “runny fingerfoods,” you’re really only narrowing down the edible possibilities by half or less, providing your readers aren’t under five years old.
You see, adjectives shouldn’t be treated like sprinkles for textual ice cream. If you glob them on like a thick crust of multi-colored bacteria, you confuse your readers. And the more impressionable ones eat it up and get sick.
“A beautiful aircraft is the expression of the genius of a great engineer who is also a great artist. It is impossible for that man to carry out the whole of the design himself; he works through a design office staffed by a hundred draughtsmen or more. A hundred minds, each with their own less competent ideas, are striving to modify the chief engineer’s original conception. If the design is to appear in the end as a great artistic unity, the chief engineer must be a man of immensely powerful will, capable of imposing his idea and his way of doing things on each of his hundred draughtsmen, so that each one of them is too terrified to insert any of his own ideas. If the chief designer has not got this personality and strength of will, his original conception will be distorted in the design office and appear as just another not-so-good airplane. He will then not be ranked as a good chief designer.
All really first-class chief designers, for this reason, are both artists, engineers, and men of a powerful and an intolerant temper, quick to resist the least modification of their plans, and energetic in fighting the least infringement upon what they regard as their own sphere of action. If they were not so, they could not produce good aeroplanes.”
After reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I’ve been inspired to write a diet book called “The Road Diet.” I’m on the first draft. It’s a post-apocalyptic diet based largely on the protagonists’ subsistence foraging. No, there’s not going to be any cannibalism, at least until week 30. Everything should be easy to acquire for under $5 a week, which is definitely affordable for Oprah book club members. Expect to lose weight! Here’s a sample week:
Day One
Day Two
Day Three
Day Four
Day Five
Day Six
Day Seven
Ira Glass, host of This American Life, was interviewed in this week’s Time Out NYC magazine. Ira cites two prime examples of how New Yorkers can be ridiculously egocentric.
You moved This American Life to New York from Chicago two years ago. Which city has better pizza?
No good can come to me from answering this question. There’s just no way to get out of it without making someone mad. The people in Chicago feel like, “Yes, you’ve had some baseball teams that have won the World Series on a more regular basis—we can’t deny that. But in this area, we’re No. 1.” New Yorkers feel like they invented pizza. Like, actually, it didn’t come from Italy; it came from some Original Ray’s shop whose actual original location will never be known.
At the live event, you’re letting the audience ask unscreened questions. Aren’t you worried that some of them will be duds?
Yes. Maybe this is a bad thing to say, but New Yorkers are the worst audience for asking questions at live events. Unlike other cities, for some reason people here will just give little speeches about their take on something.
