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How can I increase my descriptive vocabulary?

hoverboards don't work on water — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 08:20:26 -0800

How can I increase my descriptive vocabulary, particularly for the purpose of tagging photos? I like to tag my photos, but I'm not very good at describing what they are photos of. For example, I tend to have a lot of photos tagged "building", when I'm sure there are more interesting words I could be using. This is the first result on Flickr when I search for building:

http://flickr.com/photos/bandarsungailong/2052951492/

It's an interesting building, but the words that spring to my mind seem inadequate: fancy, tall, turreted, asian...

As an example of where my vocabulary is apparently not so bad, I know the difference between chair, sofa, settee, couch, seat, pew, bench, chaise longue, stool, pouffe... and so on. What I'm looking for is to be able to describe other things in similar detail.

I recognise that this is similar to what authors have to learn to add color to their prose, so an equivalent question might be: how do they do it? Is there a better way than spending a lot of time with a dictionary?

What salary should I expect as a young assistant editor for the monthly magazine of the leading organization of professional _________ engineers?

ProfLinusPauling — Sat, 26 May 2007 11:06:54 -0800

What salary should I expect as a young assistant editor for the monthly magazine of the leading organization of professional _________ engineers? Them: The magazine claims to have 32,000 professional readers across the world with significant "purchasing power." They charge $5,555 for a full page ad (though it drops if you place the same ad multiple times and obvs goes up a couple thousand if the ad is on the backpage or near the front cluttering up the reader's journey to the table of contents).

Me: I graduated college a year ago with a dual degree in History and ________ Engineering; have plenty of on-campus editorial, writing and layout experience; an English minor; and have spent the past year doing engineering work with some freelance writing in my spare time.

Based on the expensive urban location, Salary.com (which doesn't have "Assistant Editor" as an option, so I picked both "Reporter I" and "Communications Editor I"), puts me between 28k (low for "Reporter I") and as high as 75k (high for "Com Editor I").

Is 50-60k too high a hope for me to have, or just about right given that the ideal candidate for this job is a "________ engineering/print media" mutant. Also, among the engineering disciplines, this is typically one of the higher paying ones (i.e. not civil).

(Sorry, Civil E.'s! Some of my best friends are Civils: the jocks of the engineering world.)

Ukraine vs. The Ukraine

hal incandenza — Fri, 26 Nov 2004 19:23:32 -0800

Ukraine vs. The Ukraine. Is the latter outdated now that Ukraine is an independent nation? Do Ukranians feel strongly about the difference? I hear people refer to it both ways.

Can genius be used as an adjective?

MiguelCardoso — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 00:28:30 -0800

Can genius be used as adjective, as in this example from the BBC: "Send Dave your genius idea."? If so, why? [More Inside.] Given the meanings of genial in English, is there a way of translating the meaning of genial in the Romance languages?

The standard application is to brilliant, genius-like creations by people who are anything but geniuses, often ironically, as in:

"Neil Diamond's I Am, I Said is (genial)".

Genius-like isn't really satisfactory and I would prefer a simple adjective to another noun, like masterpiece, much less sheer genius, pure genius, etc.

Many thanks for any help you might give me.