Words of Praise

[Charlie]

Not sure where this belongs, but inspired by Joel's posting about a pen, I thought I'd grab the chance to put it here.

During the recording of the Radio 3 show with Justin Adams & Juldeh Camara which goes out tonight, I heard myself say 'wonderful' twice within a minute and asked the producer to let me start again when I said it for a third time.

I've been aware for a while of the limited number of adjectives of praise in my personal dictionary. I daren't look at my record-of-the-month reviews for fear of the narrow range they will reveal.

The following come up uncomfortably often:

wonderful *
marvelous *
lovely *
fantastic
excellent
remarkable
very good
brilliant

* When I write those three down, they make me sound like a camp theatre critic quoting Cole Porter or Noel Coward.

Belonging to the wrong tribe or generation, I find myself unable to use the following:

awesome
stunning
wicked
cool
far out

I could revive or retrieve: knock out

But what else. Who's got a Roget's Thesaurus to hand?

[howard male]

The adjective I most associate you with, Charlie, is 'fantastic' as it's the one I can most readily hear your voice saying in my head if I think about it.

I don't blame you for staying well clear of awesome or wicked - you'd certainly lose me as a listener if you started bandying those ones about.

Has 'cool' ever been really cool to say?

Personally I'm quite fond of (or to put it another way, probably use too often) 'sublime' which doesn't appear in your list.

Nice is nice for taking the piss out of jazz.

Then there's the rather engorged 'gorgeous' which can only be used sparingly, which is also the case for the transcendental 'divine' (or the divine 'transcendental')

Beguiling is quite nice when something is...er... beguiling.

But, at the end of the day (now there's an expression I try not to use for fear of sounding like a sports reporter) it's probably better to use those well worn words you do use than risk scaring musicians by calling their performance spine-tingling, stupefying, staggering, hair-raising, the dog's knees, or the bee's bollocks.

[NormanD]

Mike Harding, on Radio 2, over-uses, to the point of irritation, "cracking". Was this one of Andy Kershaw's favourites too?

[Adam Blake]

Noel Coward was, as you can imagine, invited out to the theatre a fair bit in his time. He devised a system for what to say when, invariably, he would be asked what had thought of the performance. "Extraordinary", he would say with great emphasis, "simply extraordinary". He figured that this covered all angles and with any luck would prevent any further elaboration being necessary on his part.

[NormanD]

Noel Coward ..."simply extraordinary"...

Has to have that particular intonation, I'm sure.

And there was the exchange in "Amadeus" where Wolfie is called on to comment, to the composer, on a piece of work he clearly disliked:

Salieri: Did my work please you?
Mozart: I never knew that music like that was possible!
Salieri: You flatter me.
Mozart: No, no! One hears such sounds, and what can one say but...â€

[Jamie Renton]

"On the money"

"Funkier than a cellar full of skunks"

"Oozing virtuosity from every pore"

I could go on (& frequently do, given 1/2 the chance)

Cheers

Jamie

[Rob Hall]

Or you could go all Smashey & Nicey on us: "groovetastic", "koralicious", "ngonificent", "djembexcellent", etc.

Yes, that's my coat, thank you...

[Dominic]

... the dog's knees, or the bee's bollocks.

The dog's mbalax?

[NormanD]

"Kora blimey, this is good!"

"I'll give it five sitars!"

Yes, that's my coat, thank you...

[Ted]

I think "safe" and "nang" have both had their day haven't they?
Especially for people over 30 and 15 respectively

Speaking of which I heard a couple of kids on the bus discussing a trendy teacher. They were not impressed. One of them said - "Yeah and he's probably got The Rascal on speed dial".

(I presume this is a reference to Dizzy, but what do I know?)

TW