Adjectives

I was a rookie reporter for a small newspaper in Palo Alto, Calif., when Dave Burgin sent me to interview the hot young quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, a guy named Joe Montana. I spent an afternoon at Joe's house, then returned to the Peninsula Times Tribune newsroom heady with the story I was about to write. Burgin, the paper's editor, hurried over to my desk. "Did you get great details?" he said. I prepared to impress the boss with a few of my great details when he barked,...

I was a rookie reporter for a small newspaper in Palo Alto, Calif., when Dave Burgin sent me to interview the hot young quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, a guy named Joe Montana. I spent an afternoon at Joe's house, then returned to the Peninsula Times Tribune newsroom heady with the story I was about to write. Burgin, the paper's editor, hurried over to my desk. "Did you get great details?" he said. I prepared to impress the boss with a few of my great details when he barked,...

Hero . . . proud . . . courage . . . brave . . . No, no, no, I'm not talking about our young men and women serving in Iraq, defending our freedom. I'm talking about what some sports reporters and henpecked husbands and boyfriends are using to describe some publicity-seeking female golfer making millions of dollars in endorsements for playing two days at golf. With the men. Go figure.

Q: Looking at your headline, the obvious question is, "Really?" Do you really think Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis would be a good mayor? A: The headline doesn't say that. It says should run for mayor, as an increasingly vocal number of her allies are urging her to do. I think she'd be a good candidate for mayor. Q: When did you become a fan? Because I'm looking at a 2011 column in which you called her "stubborn, churlish and supercilious.

Near the end of last Wednesday's Tribune profile about her, Field Museum anthropologist Anna Roosevelt was quoted telling a story in which someone described her as "sage, brave and hard." The article concluded: "It's a characterization she relishes." "Sage" and "brave," sure. But "hard"? "Hard" is on my bad list--adjectives that describe personal qualities and characteristics I don't admire. That list also includes abrupt, abusive, aloof, anxious and...

The playwright Noel Coward once said, "People are wrong when they say opera is not what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That is what's wrong with it. " His quote springs to mind when I hear folks lament that English isn't what it used to be. Often, I think, English is precisely what it used to be. And that's what's wrong with it. Take "literally," for example. If I had a dollar for every note bemoaning the misuse of this poor word, I'd be writing this column from a seaside cabana in...

The whole idea of approaching the Hawaiian Islands objectively turns to smoke at Honolulu airport. Just too many adjectives come to mind, and one of my early mentors in the newspaper business is hell on adjectives. "Avoid them at all cost," Dan said. "Pretend you are a lumberjack, a rodeo-cowboy or the meanest guy in a motorcycle club and adjectives are quiche." "But, Dan," I told him. "Adjectives are very important." "Especially, don`t use `very,` " he said. " `Very` is a very, very weak...

Even Sidewalks needs a vacation every once in a while and what better or unusual place to spend a couple of days than Decorah, Iowa. This town of some 8,000 in the hilly and lovely northeast corner of the state may not be to everyone's road trip tastes. In fact, it might not even be on anyone's vacation list. There's no water park, no ancient castles, no palm trees. Though the Laura Ingalls Wilder Park & Museum is located in 12 miles north, the nearest casino is more than an hour's drive...

Opportunistic, hypocritical, egotistical, cold-blooded, abrasive, scheming and deceitful. That was the description of Hillary Rodham Clinton recently circulated by William Powers, chairman of the New York Republican Party. I'll say something soon enough about the content of the comment, but just now I want to focus on the quality of the rhetoric. Lose the adjectives, Mr. Powers. They make it hard to take you seriously. You see, the most evocative words in the English language are nouns and verbs.

'Police, Adjective' . . On television, police procedurals are all about the DNA, and the flashy speculative flashbacks to who raped and murdered whom, and where the evidence ended up for the series regulars to discover just before the commercial. "Police, Adjective" is a procedural for the rest of us. This exquisitely dry film comes from Romanian writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu. It's not for all tastes; it requires some patience. The more your own job involves absurd, time-consuming...

We simply could not find an existing word to describe how intensely, extremely supersupersour Mega WarHeads are. (And don't your teachers warn you not to pile on the adverbs and adjectives?) So we caught a kid on film just as he slipped the candy into his mouth. These pics of Matthew G., 7, will give you the idea - though he played it pretty smooth. Look for bags of 10 for about $1.30. (We found ours at Mr. Bulky in Lincolnwood Town Center. Say that three times fast while...

A "working party" may sound as contradictory as a wet desert, but Democrats don't care. If there can be such a thing, they want theirs to be it. They are intent on helping, protecting, championing and celebrating all kinds of human beings -- as long as you can use a certain adjective to describe them. This year's party platform uses the term the way Elle Woods uses the color pink. It talks about "working families," "working people," "working Americans," "working parents," "working men and women," and...

I feel compelled to respond to the April 30 letter from Kelley Jensen, "Rich description," who questioned the use of the adjective "affluent" to describe Lake Forest in the April 20 story "Freight train kills Lake Forest boy, 11." You see, the victim of this horrendous accident, Steven Malin, was my son. I can use many adjectives to express the feelings of my family right now. Among them are extremely "shocked," "devastated," "confused" and, at times, "inconsolable." If I had to find adjectives to...

Q. What's the adjective form of the word "integrity," when you're referring to someone who displays great integrity? "Integreful"? "Integrated"? -- Carl Deitrick, Elgin A. You can do one of three things. You can either try to single-handedly revive a word such as "integritive" or "integrious," which English retired centuries ago, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (in 1658, Sir Henry Slingsby wrote in his diary, "Such was their integrious candor and intimacy to me ..."

Q: Looking at your headline, the obvious question is, "Really?" Do you really think Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis would be a good mayor? A: The headline doesn't say that. It says should run for mayor, as an increasingly vocal number of her allies are urging her to do. I think she'd be a good candidate for mayor. Q: When did you become a fan? Because I'm looking at a 2011 column in which you called her "stubborn, churlish and supercilious.

The Dictionary Society of North America was in town last week for its biennial conference celebrating language, words, dictionaries and lexicography (or any combination of these, as the 500-member international organization puts it.) One high point: the New Word Open Mic, an "American Idol"-style event during which contestants offer words they think might reach dictionary status someday. Yes, there was a panel of judges. No, dictionary editors and neologism experts are...

While channel-hopping the other day, I happened to see different versions of the way the "Sarah" custody case was reported by the local TV news. Only the NBC affiliate had the intelligence to call Sarah's biological parents "birth" parents. The other two, ABC and WGN, are still insensitive enough to refer to biological parents as "natural" parents. This means they must consider foster or adoptive parents as "unnatural." Come on, you folks in the news media, get your "unnatural" acts...

Hero . . . proud . . . courage . . . brave . . . No, no, no, I'm not talking about our young men and women serving in Iraq, defending our freedom. I'm talking about what some sports reporters and henpecked husbands and boyfriends are using to describe some publicity-seeking female golfer making millions of dollars in endorsements for playing two days at golf. With the men. Go figure.

I feel compelled to respond to the April 30 letter from Kelley Jensen, "Rich description," who questioned the use of the adjective "affluent" to describe Lake Forest in the April 20 story "Freight train kills Lake Forest boy, 11." You see, the victim of this horrendous accident, Steven Malin, was my son. I can use many adjectives to express the feelings of my family right now. Among them are extremely "shocked," "devastated," "confused" and, at times, "inconsolable." If I had to find adjectives to...