‘Very’ Is Very Tempting. Don’t Give In.

“You’re much, too much, and just too very very/ To ever be in Webster’s dictionary.”

– “Too Marvelous for Words,” lyrics by Johnny Mercer, music by Richard Whiting.

There are usually two chastening things about getting a copy-edited manuscript back from the publisher. First, most of my onlys have been moved around, so, for example, “He was only married once” becomes “He was married only once.” Second, virtually all my verys have disappeared.

In confiscating that word, the copy editors are following a widespread disdain for it, famously expressed by the prep-teacher played by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society:

John Keating: A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. And don’t use “very sad.” Use … come on, Mr. Overstreet, you twerp.

Knox Overstreet: Morose?

Keating: Exactly!

This sentiment is very often expressed in style guides, as is the idea that the word can actually weaken the adjective it precedes. Bryan Garner, characteristically, is fairly harsh in his Modern English Usage, calling very a “weasel word” and saying that it “surfaces repeatedly in flabby writing. In almost every context in which it appears, its omission would result in at most a negligible loss. And in many contexts the idea would be more powerfully expressed without it.” Garner then notes that a newspaper column referring to a “very outrageous statement” by Tiger Woods’s father would have been stronger without the very.

I agree on that quote, but there are sentences that would not be as good without the very . Consider this one from Thomas Nagel’s What Does It All Mean? A Very [emphasis added] Short Introduction to Philosophy: “The thought that the world will go on without you, that you will become nothing, is very hard to take in.” With that in mind, I usually end up restoring about half the verys in my manuscripts.

I decided to total up the use of the word in some books that I admire and have on my Kindle: SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, by Mary Beard; Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand; These Truths: A History of the United States, by Jill Lepore; and Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen. The results:

BookVerys in first 100 pagesUnbroken8SPQR27These Truths28Sense and Sensibility96

The outliers are interesting. In Sense and Sensibility, the majority of the hits come in dialogue — for example, “I should hardly call her a lively girl — she is very earnest, very eager in all she does” — suggesting either that people talked that way back then, or that Austen was very fond of very. Meanwhile, Hillenbrand’s virtual eschewing of the word says to me she has internalized the Garner/copy editor’s dislike of it. Lepore and Beard — both academics writing for a general audience — use it with almost exactly the same frequency. And in both books, I find that the percentage of cases where the word is useful, and where it would be better off gone, are both about 50. Useful, from These Truths: Magna Carta tied “the political fate of everyone in England’s colonies to the strange doings of a very bad king from the Middle Ages.” Better off gone, from SPQR: “It is also very hard, despite many confident assertions to the contrary, to pin precise dates onto the earliest phases of Roman history.”

It’s kind of amazing that I should have proceeded 563 words in this piece and not mentioned the very-user-in-chief, Donald Trump. He is inordinately fond of the word, most notably in his tweets. Looking at his recent feed, we find (emphasis added):

• “The White House is running very smoothly and the results for our Nation are obviously very good. We are the envy of the world. But anytime I even think about making changes, the FAKE NEWS MEDIA goes crazy, always seeking to make us look as bad as possible! Very dishonest!”
• “It was my great honor to host a celebration of Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, in the Roosevelt Room at the White House this afternoon. Very, very special people!”
• The problem is that Emmanuel suffers from a very low Approval Rating in France, 26%, and an unemployment rate of almost 10%. He was just trying to get onto another subject. By the way, there is no country more Nationalist than France, very proud people-and rightfully so!……..”
• “The California Fire Fighters, FEMA and First Responders are amazing and very brave. Thank you and God Bless you all!”

The same is true of Trump’s extemporaneous speaking. In recent brief remarks on the drafting of a criminal-justice reform bill,  he used very 22 times, saying it was it a “very big step” that helped people “caught up in situations that were very bad,” and giving special thanks to Jared Kushner: “He worked very hard. He really did. He worked very hard. He feels very deeply about it.”

I created a word cloud of the statement and guess which word loomed largest? (The software ignored prepositions, articles, conjunctions, and the most common verbs).

All told, the boffins over at factba.se have charted 21,959 times when Trump has uttered or written very.

Of course, no one expects the president to speak — especially off the cuff — with the same care and precision as a Laura Hillenbrand writes. But his fondness for very is of a piece with his fourth-grade-level vocabulary. It’s a word that little kids and toddlers are drawn to, in their speech and their reading matter; see The Very Hungry Caterpiller and When We Were Very Young. Our president’s reliance on it is unfortunate and telling. No verys needed.