Adjectify

It is remarkable of words denoting dimension, that they all are abstracted into names by subjoining th, as length, breadth, width, and depth, and that these are not ordinarily allowed to be adjectified by adding either y or full.

If we desire to affirm that the substantive is put in action, we adjectify it by adding to its positive the termination tla; for example atawit, love; adjective affirming action atawit-la, loving.

Wiles’ title – Foredoomed is my Forest: The Diary of a Zimbabwe [sic] Farmer – is problematic for another reason. He may not use Africa, but his failure to ‘adjectify’ Zimbabwe is an all too obvious reflection on the quality and content of the rest of the book.

The influence of Kafka on popular culture is undeniable, whether people have read his books or not. He is one of a few authors who have had their names adjectified. Situations or organisations are called ‘kafkaesque’ to denounce an absurdly painful series of events or experiences usually set in or involving a bureaucratic organisation (see for instance Hodson, Roscigno, Martin, & Lopez, 2013).

She adjectifies the teens as “iridescent,” the twenties as “glowing,” the thirties as “warning” and the forties as “triumphant.”

Adjectifying the “lower” animals to describe dastardly conduct on the part of “Superior” animals is always incorrect because the lower animals never act in a dastardly fashion.

However, since Moers’s work in the mid-1970s, attempts to adjectify Stein’s work as “female” have entangled that work far more deeply with Stein’s femaleness as femaleness, as an elemental condition, inseparable from the body.

Niebuhr “adjectifies” love in terms of self-sacrifice and thus “gains too easy a victory, and by a somewhat mistaken strategy, in his campaign to demonstrate the (relevant) impossibility of love.”