The paper shows on several adjectives with irregular paradigms or with limited gradational potential the developmental gap between traditional Czech prescriptive manuals or dictionaries on the one hand and communicative reality on the other. At the same time, it draws on the author's experience with the work of the Institute for the Czech Language and introduces the mechanisms used in the creation of the Academic Dictionary of Contemporary Czech and the Internet Language Handbook to mitigate this discrepancy. For both of these primarily electronic works, the Czech National Corpus is the main source of language data. As a result, their descriptive character is strengthened, without compromising the pursuit of linguistic culture. The paper thus shows the way to understanding contemporary Czech both through its linguistic description and its more or less faithful image in real communication.