062Y55A00 24/04 Bad Weather Adjectives

Friday was a horrible day. Although I had planned on doing an entire class of what makes a work of Literature into a Classic I decided instead that this was a good opportunity to do some practical vocabulary work.

Often - especially if we are talking about things around us - its good if we can see them at the time when we are trying to describe them. Friday was a good illustration of this: adjectives more easily spring to our mind if we can look out the window and see the soggy [damp; saturated] ground, dripping trees and grey skies. You came up with some beauties [really good ones] - even if we did have to put in a few pretty obvious ones to get started.

Since the loss of the all-important Blue Book I am a little disordered so I might not have the complete list here: if anyone can think of others I miss out please post them below and we'll add them. Also, if you have found any more good ones we didn't mention feel free to add those too.

Words to use for a Rainy day.

depressing: lowers the spirit
murky: unclear; difficult to see things sharply or clearly
damp: not actually wet, just not dry to the touch
miserable: sad; that which makes us feel sad
gloomy: miserable or depressing
grey: although a colour we often use this word to describe sad, gloomy things or even people
glowering: means to look angry or forbidding; a rainy day can be like that
squally: squalls are gust of wind that have rain in them; or the sound a crying baby makes
windy: as well as being an adjective for weather, "wind" is the name we give to body gasses like a burp or a fart: we call this 'passing wind'. So windy can apply to a person who has a lot of gas

The following are just used to express negatives, or to mean 'bad' and can be used equally about people, the weather, a movie, a book; anything we don't like:

nasty
yukky
horrible
terrible
shitty
bad
not-good

the word 'bloody' is mainly used as a superlative. That means it takes the place of 'very'. Thus something can be terrible or bloody terrible, horrible or bloody horrible.

It is often used in the middle of a (usually 3 syllable) word - especially by Australian and English people: fan-bloody-tastic( really fantastic), out-bloody-standing( really outstanding), and the humerous horri-bloody-bubble(horrible).