Adject Misery

I said I was gonna do "gut" today but I got a couple adjectives to whine about. Tomorrow, probably.

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The front page of today's local paper has this news story with the following headline:

Mayor race heats up

and I am not pleased.

I know I go on about how versatile English is, how we use one word for various parts of speech without batting an eyelash, but that is not a good headline. "Mayor" is a noun, an adjective is called for before the noun "race", and we have a perfectly good adjectival form of "mayor"; it's "mayoral". What's wrong with using that, headline writers? It's hardly any longer than "mayor", and it's correct.

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Two reviews of another new movie I'll never see, this one called Forgetting Sarah Marshall with, again, the involvement of the very busy Judd Apatow.

Here's a sentence from the Slate review:

Segel's character, Peter Bretter, is the most emotionally naked Apatovian hero yet.

And here's one from the Salon review:

But "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" is less Apatow than it is Apatowistic.

Proper nouns ending in "-w" take the adjectival ending "-vian", as I have noted before. Making up your own adjective as a lark: not always a good idea, particularly when it's clumsy and ugly.