Truly, Madly, Deeply Avoiding Adverbs

Pity the lowly adverb. Like the adenoids (I had mine removed, at age 4) or the appendix, it is regarded by rule-mongers as unnecessary, left over from a time when the body of language needed this now-useless organ to process niceties of language that we now handle by way of verbs. Or nouns. Or the effectively placed period.

Only two classes of people, it seems, stick up for the adverb: young adults and members of the bar. A proposal from a student almost never offers to read and scrutinize a particular passage; it offers to closely  read and carefully scrutinize the passage. From a recent student abstract, chosen at random (italics mine): “A personal issue most prominent in my last reading of the text was a quite frequent confusion with some of Fitzgerald’s more elaborately descriptive massages that rely heavily on figurative interpretations to denote potentially powerful meaning.” Whew. Social media exacerbate the tendency, with tweets and updates chirping about being incredibly inspired, so totally excited, more than slightly amused, not to mention the stand-alone Seriously. It’s tempting to start sharpening the surgeon’s blade.

Then along come the lawyers. My father was one—a judge, in fact. You could never say it made your life difficult to take your kid sister to the fair without his leveling his gaze at you and asking: But did it make your life substantially difficult? Now there’s a powerful word, substantially. In a court of law, I imagine it can rack up hundreds of thousands in fees for well-versed attorneys: one fellow’s idea of substantial is another’s idea of piffle. As Jacob Gershman suggests in a recent Wall Street Journal article on legalese and adverbial inclinations, “Adverbs in recent years have taken on an increasingly important—and often contentious—role in courthouses. Their influence has spread with the help of lawmakers churning out new laws packed with them.”

So we get the slicing and dicing of knowingly, recklessly, intentionally, and indiscriminately, to name a few. When does something become indiscriminate? How do we prove intention? Trust me, my dad knew how to wield this part of speech; my sister came to the fair. and so I grew up understanding—as surely, the lawyers in my dad’s courtroom understood—that you needed to sharpen your adverbs before you even approached the bench to make your argument.

The real trouble hits when “colorful” adverbs, rather than opening up some metaphysical universe for argument, toss down a judgment. Take, for instance, the reaction by lawyers on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform when Attorney General Eric Holder defended his department’s use of adverbs like traditionally and ordinarily. Holder “flippantly dismisses the Committee’s contentions as a dislike of adverbs,” wrote the lawyers. “In fact, we have no problem with adverbs.”

No, I guess they don’t. In fact, they seem to like one a lot: flippantly.

Like everything else in our language (yeah, I’m talkin’ to you, Passive Voice; and you, those cuss words I can’t write here), adverbs have great work to do and should be handled responsibly. Anyway, they’re unavoidable. Just witness Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s explanation, at the end of Gershman’s article, of his decision to avoid adverbs as much as possible: “You just discipline yourself,” he says, “to choose your words very carefully.”