Against Linguistic Hyperpharisaism

In this essay I am going to hold forth against a tendency that I probably first noticed only about a dozen years ago, although I have evidence that it began at least a dozen years before that, evidence that I shall eventually find opportunity to share with the reader or listener. The tendency in question is the tendency among police-like entities to censure as rule-violations certain usages of English that in fact cannot be regarded as rule-violations in even the loosest of senses. This tendency is not to be confused with the tendency of such entities to censure usages that may be regarded as rule-violations in at least the strictest of senses, which is why this essay is called “Against Linguistic Hyperpharisaism” and not “Against Linguistic Pharisaism.” To be sure, linguistic Pharisaism, by which I understand the tendency to pounce on every violation of every rule of usage, however trivial or obscure or debatable that rule may be, is a nuisance, but I have no interest in writing an essay against linguistic Pharisaism—first, because there is no attribute or class of attributes that is or are generally agreed to distinguish a rule that must be observed from a rule that need not be, or any criterion or set of criteria by which one might draw such a distinction oneself. I happen to think constructions of the form “me + some noun”—for example, “me and my mother” and “me and my shadow” are to be avoided even in the most informal speech; in my view, even among one’s dearest friends or in the lowest company one should instead say “my mother and I,” “my shadow and I,” and the like. I also happen to think that even a grammatically appropriate “whom” sounds unpardonably stiff in all but the most formal speech; that the utterer of “Whom did you see?” to his next-door neighbor and “The bagboy whom I asked for help with my groceries” to a supermarket manager would have done better to say “Who did you see?” and, provided he didn’t want to dispense with the relative pronoun altogether by opting for “The bagboy I asked for help with my groceries” (which probably would have been just fine), “The bagboy who I asked for help with my groceries.” But I can readily enough imagine that there are people who are absolute sticklers for observation of the who/whom distinction and have no qualms whatsoever about “me and my mother,” and at least as of now I haven’t the vaguest idea of how I might go about persuading such a person to be more laid back about “Who did you see?” and more uptight about “me and my mother.” Not that I despair of ever acquiring the sharpest idea of how I might go about doing that, of working out exactly why “Who did you see?” is acceptable spoken English and “me and my mother” isn’t, but that even if I do acquire that idea it is unlikely to form a practicable basis for an essay against linguistic Pharisaism en bloc because the principle on the grounds of which “Who did you see?” is to be defended it is likely to be quite a distinctly different one from the one on the grounds of which “me and my mother” is to be assailed, and each of these principles is likely to be distinctly different from the principles on the grounds of which any other solecism or pseudo-solecism, from the unattached participle to the split infinitive, may be defended. So basically each of the defenses of or assaults on each of these solecisms or pseudo-solecisms would have to be undertaken in an essay treating of its pertinent founding principle and could not be undertaken in an essay against linguistic Pharisaism en bloc. Another reason why I have no interest in writing an essay against linguistic Pharisaism—or, rather, because, as I have just shewn, an essay against linguistic Pharisaism as a general phenomenon is effectively impossible—on any instance of linguistic Pharisiaism, is that in this age of licentiousness for licentiousness’s sake in all domains of life, there is scarcely any rule of English usage whose wanton violation has not already been graced by its championing essay, and doubtless precious few whose WV has not already been graced by upwards of dozens of such essays, such that in defending the-less-than-strict observance of any rule I am unlikely to be contributing any original insight into that rule or why it need not be strictly observed. And complementarily, in this age of licentiousness for licentiousness’ sake in all domains of life, I cannot but fear that, for all my super-picayune-ness of my pretensions to authority in meta-linguistic matters, in defending the less-than-strict observance of any rule I am all too likely to be abetting my arch-enemies, the champions of licentiousness for licentiousness’s sake in all domains of life; in other words, I cannot but fear that any reader of an essay by me championing the use of “who” instead of “whom” in everyday speech is all too likely to interpret my championing of laxity with regard to that particular rule as a synecdoche for laxity with regard to rules in general, and to receive my essay as the straw that breaks the back of the camel bearing his last residue of resistance to the temptation to freebase crack cocaine during his next bus commute or her last residue of resistance to the temptation to don Yoga pants for her next attendance in the audience at a performance at the Metropolitan Opera. By “linguistic Hyperpharisaism” I understand a phenomenon categorically different from and at least potentially altogether more pernicious than linguistic Pharisaism; a phenomenon that is less worthy of description as a vice or bad habit than as a form of madness—namely, the categorical assailing and rejection of usages that instantiate certain established structural features of our language, features in whose absence English would “in a certain very real sense” no longer be English at all, at least in full. Chief among these stigmatized features is the passive voice as distinguished from the active voice. In the active voice, the subject of the sentence performs the action denoted by the verb: “I ate the sandwich,” “He drives the car,” and “She smiles” are all in the active voice. In the passive voice the subject of the sentence is the entity on or to which the action denoted by the verb is performed: “The sandwich was eaten by me,” “The car is driven by him,” and “Her smile is smiled by her” are all in the passive voice. To me it seems reasonable to regard the passive voice as a radically integral part of the English language because to the best of my knowledge not only English but also all other modern European languages and the two main ancient European languages, Greek and Latin, have a passive voice, although not all of these languages form the voice in the same way as we Anglophones do—in German, for example, it is formed them not with the verb meaning to be, sein, but with the verb werden, meaning to become; and some languages avail themselves of it more liberally than others. French, for example, tends to offer reflexive verbs for use in contexts in which English-speakers would use the passive voice, and German-speakers often achieve a passive voice-like effect with man—their equivalent of our impersonal pronoun one—in the active voice. But none of these languages has dispensed with the passive voice completely, and although of course we should never regard any facet of any other language as a full-fledged precedent to be imported unmodified into ours, it seems entirely reasonable to fight shy of even entertaining the notion of discontinuing any facet of our language that has proved to be a stable constituent of the languages most closely related to ours. But in seeming defiance of reason certain entities with widely acknowledged pretentions to linguistic authority have lately gone much farther than merely entertaining the notion of discontinuing the passive voice and have gone so far, indeed, as to aim full-steam ahead for this discontinuation by categorically proscribing that voice. The more recent versions of Microsoft Word, for example, will not stick at putting a squiggly red line under an occurrence of “The omelet is eaten by me,” “The ball is being kicked by the boy,” or “The woman’s teeth were being brushed by her,” and of course the squiggly red line signals that the underlined string of text comprises a definite error; unlike the squiggly green line it is not meant merely to alert the writer to a choice that may be stylistically ill advised. Admittedly Microsoft Word will not stick at putting a squiggly red line under passive constructions by default; admittedly, the user has to select the option to have them underlined that is presented in the options menu for the spelling and grammar checker. But of course Word would not present that option were it not an option that a substantial proportion of its customers found desirable, as they would do only if they themselves regarded the use of the passive voice as the infringement of a rule; for after all, Word’s spelling and grammar checker does not offer any options that merely cater to the user’s arbitrary preferences: for example, a lipogrammist cannot ask the checker to red-squiggle every occurrence of a word containing a certain letter of the alphabet. Besides, the user is not always in control of which usages are squiggled or whether they receive a red squiggle or the less peremptory green one. At the governmental agency at which I formerly worked, my passive constructions were automatically red-squiggled, and I was as powerless to un-squiggle them as I was to impel my supervisors and coworkers to present me with Word documents that didn’t deserve virtually uninterrupted double red squiggles for egregious actual transgressions of grammar. For a description of these transgressions the reader or listener may turn to my essay “Customizing the Corpse for the Coffin,” as the governmental agency referred to therein is the same as the one referred to herein and just now. But to return to the passive voice as a topic in its own right: notwithstanding my paternity of the three passive constructions cited a few sentences ago, the first three such constructions that occurred to me in the course of composing the sentence containing them, I would be if not the first then very probably not the last person to admit that they aren’t exactly pretty or that they wouldn’t be improved by conversion into the active voice, by being recast as “I eat the omelet,” “The boy is kicking the ball,” and “The woman was brushing her teeth,” but I would be the very last person, or at least the very last sane person, to term them ungrammatical. They are indeed as impeccably grammatical as “The cat sat on the mat” or “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” So why are they and grammatically parallel constructions flagged as grammatically erroneous—or, as Microsoft Word would prefer, “Why is Microsoft Word flagging them and grammatically parallel constructions as grammatically erroneous?” I have in my possession no empirical evidence of any kind that would allow me to answer this question with the remotest approach to certitude—no press release or inter-office memo from Microsoft with “Re: Anti-Passive Voice Initiative” as its subject line, say, or You-Tube footage of an interview in which Mr. Gates or his successor addresses his software’s stigmatization of the voice; nor even, indeed, any remarks from any of my fellow Word-users about the stigmatization, and certainly no complaints thereabout therefrom, but the silence with which the stigmatization has been greeted, in conjunction with numerous criticisms of the passive voice that I have heard being emitted by my fellow-Anglophones, Word-users and non-Word users alike, in recent years, suggests to me an explanation for the stigmatization that may initially seem to bear no conceivable causal relation whatsoever thereto—viz., the pan-Anglospheric reverence accorded to George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” in which the author attacks the passive voice with peculiarly excoriating vituperation perhaps paralleled only in the sermons of certain old-school Protestant preachers like Johnathan Edwards—paralleled, that is, in their sermons against Scripturally proscribed sins, mind you, not against the passive voice, against which as far as I know neither they nor any of their contemporaries of any religious or secular profession harbored any grudge. There is undoubtedly something counterintuitive about my ascribing immediate efficient causality of such a recent phenomenon as this stigmatization to an entity of such remote genesis as an essay published nearly eighty years ago, and perhaps there is something especially counterintuitive about my ascribing it to this Orwell essay, for one cannot in good faith assert that that essay fell dead-born from the press when it was first published or that it has ever since  been “forgotten” in even the modern vulgar sense according to which any entity that is no longer a top-ten item in the world’s list of famous entities is forgotten. “Politics and the English Language” has in fact always been enormously popular as an authority on English usage and indeed has probably only ever been exceeded by Fowler’s and Strunk and White in its popularity in that capacity.  But over the past quarter-century or so, Orwell himself has become not only enormously more popular but also enormously more prestigious—not to be sure, on the basis of “Politics and the English Language” but on the basis of two of his novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. By a curious paradox that is doubtless resolvable into a law at some resolution, as Anglophones’ taste in literature has deteriorated and their acquaintance with books worth reading has diminished, their respect for the few writers they do still read—all of them novelists—has swelled to outright idolatry. They have ceased to see novelists as fallible portraitists of the world who even at their most faithful are bound to fall short of perfection in virtue of the finitude imposed by the principle of selection, by the impossibility of including everything within the “frames” of their compositions, and come to see them as infallible prophets and oracles whose works must be studied with indefatigable scrutiny for anticipations of anathema-worthy aspects of the present; and conversely the present must be indefatigably studied for descendants of even the writer’s least fearsome bugbears. Basically under this dispensation, anything some great or supposedly great novelist found objectionable is regarded by everyone as the worst thing that could ever possibly exist or happen, and everyone is constantly on guard against manifestations or occurrences of that thing. With regard to Orwell, everyone is terrified of suddenly finding himself “literally living in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four,” a novel to which “Politics and the English Language” has become a sort of annex or supplement, such that each of its proscribed usages, including the passive voice, has come to be regarded as a constituent of the novel’s dreaded parody of Basic English, Newspeak. It is now universally feared that if expressions like “it is now universally feared” aren’t quashed in the next ten minutes, a year from now we shall all be saying “double-plus ungood” instead of “bad.” But this observation prompts or elicits but most certainly does not beg the question, “Given that Newspeak was based on a real-world systemized mangling of the English language and that ‘double-plus ungood’ really is such a double double-plus ungood substitute for ‘bad,’ might not today’s stigmatization of the passive voice be not entirely unfounded—or, to employ a less double-plus ungood-like construction (the rhetorical term for constructions of that form is litotes [I mention this simply because it has just occurred to me that the original, primal target of Orwell’s meta-linguistic fury may have been not modish Newspeak but the ancient classical rhetoric that was doubtless drilled into him during his schooldays at Eton]) all too well founded? And the true answer to this question is doubtless “Yes.” Of course, if I were—or had been ten seconds ago—a true Orwellian in a comically underused sense (which is to say, one of the two or three main sense-types of ian-ending adjectives derived from writers’ names [adjectives like Shakespearian, Johnsonian, and Dickensian {for it is surely significant that apart from Orwellian, eponymous adjectives denoting only the horrifying or grotesque aspects of a writer’s work take the more foreign-sounding and therefore more off-putting termination –esque, as in Kafkaesque and Dante-esque {although “Swiftian” may be an Orwellian-esque exception}])—I would have simply answered with a one-word reply of “Yes” or at the very least not qualified my windy multi-word assertion with the weasely adverb “doubtless.” But the truth is—and here I am not going to qualify my assertion with “doubtless” because I am absolutely certain of the truthfulness of the predicated state of affairs in point—that there are occasions, or rather events much more frequent than occasions (I would term them “frequencies” if countable “frequency” did not already denote a radio band-length--if, in other words, it were not already an occupied “frequency” linguistically speaking) on which one is not absolutely certain of what one is asserting and yet one finds it worthwhile to assert it, such that if one wishes to be both honest and productive one really has no choice but to answer with a full-fledged sentence a question in principle answerable with a bare “yes” or “no” and to avail oneself of a qualifying adverb like “doubtless.” Of course the world has always teemed with people who answer such questions in such a fashion because they are weasels who don’t believe what they are asserting at all but find it impolitic to say what they really believe, but one mustn’t transform oneself into a “Yes” or “No”-man out of fear of being mistaken for such a weasel, because such fear is itself quintessentially weasely. But the or at least an unqualified truth, the or at least a “doubtless”-free truth, is that the degree of well-foundedness of today’s stigmatization of the passive voice is a phenomenon that requires such qualification as is afforded by “doubtless,” because there are undoubtedly—which is to say not merely doubtless but certainly—quite a number of people who habitually employ the passive voice in a Newspeak-like way—as a way of obfuscating what is most significant about the state of affairs that they are referencing, as a way of making it seem to be about something peripheral to it instead of being about what is central to it by making it unclear who has caused something—generally something bad—to happen, and thereby making it impossible to assign responsibility for the bad event to a specific agent. So a child who having being entrusted with the care of a puppy feeds it to an alligator at the zoo, might say, on being queried by his elders about the whereabouts of the little dog afterwards, “It was fed to an alligator at the zoo” in the hope that his elders assume the zookeeper rather than he, the tot himself, did the feeding. Of course one most often encounters this responsibility-shunting use of the passive voice in bureaucratic (and therefore axiomatically “Orwellian” or “Kafkaesque”) contexts, contexts in which owing to the numerousness and anonymity of the set of suspectable agents, the user stands a pretty good chance of getting away with the use. If Jones, an employee of a government agency or large private company tasked with handling inquiries from the general public is asked by a member of that general public for the whereabouts of some piece of paper submitted for processing long ago and cannot readily locate that piece of paper, he is likely to answer that it possibly “was misrouted” even if he knows from long experience at the organization that it was almost certainly misrouted and that Jenkins in accounts payable almost certainly must have misrouted it. He is likely to answer this for three reasons that I can think of right now (and I am sure there are at least four other likely reasons): that he likes Jenkins well enough not to want to get him in trouble, that mentioning Jenkins’s name in such a context would be tantamount to disciplining him, and he, the inquiry-handler is not authorized to discipline his fellow-employees; and that his and Jenkins’s superiors are not likely to want it disclosed to a member of the general public that there is such a person as Jenkins in accounts payable, lest that member immediately start bawling out Jenkins, which is likely to put the superiors’ noses out of joint for any number of reasons. I hope the scenario outlined in the preceding two sentences justifies my earlier use of the qualifying “doubtless,” because this scenario is certainly tedious enough as it is and on its own. I not only hope but trust that it gives the reader or listener the sense that a “faceless bureaucrat” and even a “faceless bureaucracy” might have uses for the passive voice that are more ethically redeemable than those to which that voice was (or is) put by the abovementioned puppy-guarding child and even more ethically redeemable than the linguistic depravations of Newspeak, whose raison d’être was after all to facilitate the incessant stomping of a boot on a human face. It is not easy to envisage a worthy purpose that would be served by Jones’s bluntly and immediately announcing to the seeker of the piece of paper, “Jenkins in accounts payable lost it.” Of course, there is a danger that after Jones has told the paper-seeker, “It was probably misrouted,” the paper-seeker will never get any further towards understanding what happened to the piece of paper he submitted, or even that the piece of paper will never be found and hence that he will be put through the misery of having to fill out and submit an entirely new piece of paper (or, God forbid, if the misplaced paper-piece is some sort of one-of-a-kind irreplaceable document, forced to abandon all hope of achieving whatever end he hoped to achieve in submitting the piece of paper). Jones himself might simply never approach Jenkins to ask him about the piece of paper, for instance; or Jenkins, on being approached by Jones, might be bawled out and peremptorily told to go take a hike; or Jones, on going to his boss—let’s just call him Smith, although he isn’t really going to be around here long enough to merit a name—to complain about having been bawled out and told to take a hike by Jenkins, might be told by Smith that “for the good of the organization” it would be best not trouble Jenkins any further about the piece of paper (doubtless [!] only because Smith himself is afraid of being bawled out and told to take a hike by Jenkins). But the passive voice will have been the efficient cause of none of these lamentable and reprehensible sequels to the paper-seeker’s inquiry. I am not about to trot out an analogy to any of the usual truisms centering on certain implements and the uses to which they are put (or to which people put them) because every single one of these truisms has become politically incendiary in one direction or another; suffice it to say that the passive voice is at least as deserving of such a truism as most of the implements on which such a truism has been bestowed (or on which people have bestowed such), which is to say that one ought not to disparage anyone for using it, the passive voice, unless one can be sure that the user used it out of blame-shifting motives (because it is often used [or people often use it] out of entirely different motives), and that categorically refusing to use it oneself with the aim avoiding blame-shifting is bound at least occasionally to cause one to shift blame despite oneself. In the opening sentence of my scenario, I quite rightly wanted to make Jones the center of the attention because he was the one who was to use the passive-voice construction “The paper was possibly misrouted,” and making him the focus of attention required making him the subject of the main clause, “he is likely to answer it was possibly ‘misrouted,’” which in turn necessitated making him the subject of two passive-constructions: “tasked with handling inquiries from the general public” and “is asked by a member of that general public.” Disencumbering the opening sentence would have required breaking it up into a pair or trio of separate sentences each with its own subject or pair of subjects, roughly as follows: “At a government agency or large private company Jones’s superiors have tasked him with handling inquiries from the general public. If a member of this general public asks Jones for the whereabouts of some piece of paper submitted for processing long ago and Jones cannot readily locate that piece of paper, Jones is likely to answer that it possibly ‘was misrouted’ even if he knows from long experience etc.” My original version primes the reader from the start to expect Jones to be the employer of the passive voice by contriving to mention him in its second word. My revision, by necessarily mentioning two other subjects of active-voice constructions—Jones’s superiors and the member of the general public—before mentioning Jones himself qua subject, prompts the reader pointlessly to wonder if one of these subjects is going to be the passive-voice user, or possibly even pointlessly to wonder what the deuce this entire deuced rigmarole has got to do with the use of the passive voice and therefore possibly even to stop reading before he reaches the concatenation’s illustrative instance of that use. All the same, a counterfactual reader or listener who encountered the revision first might not find its perverse marginalization of Jenkins particularly off-putting and would after all eventually come to learn that Jenkins was the passive-voice user; such that one might term the revision’s perverse employment of the active voice a latent perversity. There are, however, certain uses of the active voice that are overtly perverse, uses thereof that cannot but strike even the reader or listener unacquainted with passive-voiced alternatives as ridiculous, awkward, or even tasteless. For some reason, I tend to find examples involving the destruction of beautiful man-made structures particularly vividly illustrative of this assertion. Take a sentence like “The original Belvedere Hotel, a magnificent ten-story Belle-Époque building in the neo-Rococo style, was demolished in 1970 to make way for the five-story New-Brutalist Belvedere that stands there today.” Is it in any way improved by being recast as a sentence that reads: “In 1970, the Acme Demolition Company blew up the original Belvedere Hotel, a magnificent ten-story Belle-Époque building,” etc.? Or a sentence like, “The original of this portrait of Joseph Haydn was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid.” Can anyone genuinely prefer its active-voice alternative, “A Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber plane dropped the blockbuster that destroyed the original of this portrait of Joseph Haydn.”? The sad or happy truth is that what happens to someone or something is often more important than who or what makes whatever happens to it happen and that accordingly a passive-voice construction is often preferable to an active-voice one, although to term such a construction “preferable” misleadingly suggests that one will have generally arrived at it as the result of consciously pondering whether to use the active or the passive voice when one will have generally arrived at it as a matter of course, which is to say, as a result of simply knowing that the scene or situation to be written about is one in which the entity acted upon rather than the agent takes pride of place or center stage. Such being the non-grammatical case, the entire topic of the passive voice is perhaps better addressed by the moralist than by the grammarian, although as my use of the phrase “matter of course” in the last sentence suggests, even the moralist will largely have occasion to address this topic descriptively rather than prescriptively, to point out the inappropriate use of the passive or active voice as a symptom of a generally inadequate moral orientation rather than as a bad moral practice to be corrected in isolation. Even making the avoidance of the passive voice into a certain sort of rule of thumb, the rule of thumb that dictates that the practice in question is to be avoided unless some strong reason for opting for it can be adduced, is dangerous because even rules of thumb “scale” poorly (I just put “scale” in quotation marks because the sense in which I have just employed it is a dubious neologism [as I have confirmed by not finding it in my 1990 Concise Oxford Dictionary], but I didn’t stick at using it because I couldn’t think of a more appropriate word to use, a circumstance that I find disturbing inasmuch as the phenomenon designated by it cannot but be at least as ancient as the blueprints of the great pyramids). What I mean in saying that a rule of thumb “scales” poorly is that while such a rule may be effectively and ethically enough adopted and applied by one person on his own, its inculcation upon a great number of people at once is bound frequently to eventuate in unethical results and hence to prove ineffective or even “counterproductive.” The abovementioned implementation of the proscription of the passive voice by my former employer the governmental agency is a case in illustration of the inefficacy-cum-counterproductiveness of the “scaling” of such rules. Whichever faceless or faceded functionary decreed the organization-wide selection of Microsoft Word’s passive-voice-flagging option was presumably aware of the associations of the passive voice with faceless bureaucracies and presumably imposed the selection with the express aim of reducing the frequency of such acts of administrative buck-passing as one witnesses in my Jones-and-Jenkins scenario, or at least with the more general aim of making the agency’s public image less stereotypically bureaucratic. But as I can confidently attest on the evidence of the tens of thousands of pages of prose that I was obliged to proofread for the agency—pages whose content was ultimately destined for the eyes of the public—its proscription of the passive voice did not make its employees a jot more human-seeming and seemingly only made their writing all the more difficult to render even minimally readable thanks to the pullulation therein of genuine grammatical transgressions, transgressions that had “flown beneath the radar” of the grammar checker, as the most occlusive such transgressions tend to do owing to their inextricability from certain macro-syntactic structures, structures that extend far beyond the relation between, say, a verb and its geographically most proximate subject.

“Something too much of this.” Much as I loathe so-called hard breaks, I am going to have to make such a break now, as I really can’t descry any sub-generic connection between the species of hyperpharisaism I have just described and the one that I am about to describe. Actually that’s not quite true: like the passive voice, the usage wrongly prescribed by this species has come in for some squiggly red underlining by the Word spelling and grammar checker. But because in contrast to Word’s treatment of the passive voice the squiggly red underlining isn’t consistently applied to this usage, here squiggly red underlining isn’t a particularly good starting point for a discussion of that usage’s stigmatization. Anyway, the usage in question is nothing less massive or fundamental to our language than the entire class of words known as adverbs. At the outset I must concede that I have not found adverbs animadverted against nearly as widely as the passive voice; I must concede, indeed, that unlike the passive voice, adverbs appear to be in no immediate or mediate danger of being reduced to the linguistic equivalent of an endangered species, let alone to the linguistic equivalent of a dodo or passenger-pigeon because unlike the passive voice they have not yet attracted the gunfire of the multi-million-strong Anglophone intellectual petite bourgeoisie. Who, then, is or are directing their gunfire at adverbs en bloc, and why am I dismayed by it or their attack given that I have already conceded it poses no so-called existential threat to that bloc? Why, axiomatically, the Anglophone intellectual grande bourgeoisie who, although much smaller in number than their petit-bourgeois contemporaries are axiomatically deserving of much greater deference—not, to be sure, that they are deserving of supinely reflexive obedience but that when a member of their number objects to something or some practice, however irrational or unreasonable their objections thereto may seem to be, one should at least be prepared to entertain those objections, to entertain the notion that this person has espied something objectionable about it that one has oneself overlooked. Now in this case, the case of the proscription of adverbs, I have in fact discovered three intellectual grands bourgeois tendering the objection, although as the first two were and are friends of each other and tendered the objection in virtual unison and within earshot of each other perhaps I should simply count them together as one intellectual grand bourgeois. At any rate, I have concluded that these two are at least tentatively to be regarded as intellectual grands bourgeois because one of them is a sort of art historian who has uttered some remarks about Francis Bacon the younger that struck me as thoughtful and insightful to the admittedly limited extent to which my superficial and indeed merely intellectually petit-bourgeois-worthy acquaintance with Frank’s oeuvre enabled me to appraise them; and because the other is a sort of Shakespeare scholar who has published a few books on the Bard that seem to set forth arguments that strike me as sane and cogent to the admittedly limited extent to which, inasmuch as I haven’t read any of these books, I have acquired an adequate sense of their contents from their 50-to-a-hundred-word-long encapsulations on Amazon. Admittedly, this selfsame Shakespeare scholar of sorts has admitted that he finds the shall/will distinction “tricky,” when any true intellectual grand bourgeois in the grand tradition thereof ought to find the shall/will distinction about as tricky as the backside/hole-in-the-ground one, but as he is barely forty and hence at least technically a so-called Millennial, I am grudgingly willing to grant him a sort of generational handicap and recognize him as an intellectual grand bourgeois for simply being aware that there is or used to be such a point of English usage as the shall/will distinction. But enough about these blokes’ or gents’ credentials—what about their argument? What about the reasons or rationale they adduced in support of their rejection of adverbs? For after all, in stating a few minutes ago that intellectual grand-bourgeoishood automatically made a person’s objections worth entertaining, I did more or less axiomatically imply that these objections would be founded in something solidly entertainable, something capable of being swished against one’s mind’s soft palate a few times, something framable as a “because” clause. But I now see that I was a mile wide of the mark in implying anything of the kind, for on perusing my mind’s tables I find no note therein of anything approaching an argument from these gents or blokes; all I find therein, indeed, is, mutatis mutandis, that logical positivist’s famous or notorious reductio ad absurdum of all morally based arguments against stealing money—viz., “I don’t care for adverbs” and “Adverbs—mmbflbh!” respectively. So in truth I have no idea why either of these blokes or gents doesn’t care for adverbs. But what about my other grand-bourgeois disparager? Well, he was and is none other than the Australian writer Gerald Murnane, who deserves some deference not only as a man of high intelligence and deep knowledge of literature in English but also as a formidable prose stylist. But to the best of my knowledge (a knowledge that could admittedly be bettered, as I have as read less than half of Murnane’s published output), his entire polemic on adverbs consists of a single parenthetical sentence that occurs towards the end of his most recent (and purportedly last) book, Last Letter to a Reader and reads as follows: “I decided long ago that few adverbs are needed in prose.” Apart from its less than fully categorical dismissal of adverbs—i.e., its preference of “few adverbs” to “no adverbs”—and its confinement of the scope of its proscription to prose, this utterance is obviously identical in substance to those of the other two dudes and therefore no more enlightening as regards any thought-trains that either may have preceded it or might yet be adduced in support of it. So basically I have no idea whatsoever why any of these dudes objects to the adverb, such that it follows that nothing but superstitious idolatry of their intellectual grand bourgeoishood could ever impel me to follow their example in shunning that part of speech—and that it further follows that the only reader or listener who could ever be persuaded to follow my example were I to follow theirs would be a reader who both shared with me my superstitious idolatry of intellectual grands bourgeoises and regarded me in particular as an intellectual grand bourgeois. And as for all the loftiness of my de facto appraisal of intellectual grand bourgeoises by comparison with my de facto appraisal of intellectual petits bourgeoises I am certainly no superstitious idolator of intellectual grands bourgeoises, I owe it both to myself and to my readers and listeners to have a go at ferreting or stoating out not only what these gents or blokes could conceivably have found objectionable about adverbs but also what, if anything, actually might be intrinsically objectionable about adverbs and then to have a go at determining whether any of these objectionable qualities are sufficiently objectionable to warrant any sort of prescription of any degree of restraint or restriction of scope in the use of adverbs—from the most tentative of situationally contingent cautionary notes to an outright global peremptory proscription. As we have seen, the art historian and Shakespeare scholar give us nothing to go on. Murnane, in asserting that he has firmly decided that “few adverbs are needed in prose” gives us reason to suppose that he believes that a few adverbs are needed in prose and to conclude that he may believe that quite a few or even many adverbs are needed in poetry.  And as Murnane has published at least one volume of poetry and indeed is—at least to the best of my recollection (which is admittedly not good enough to pinpoint the passage in which he has made the SOA in question evident)—one of those numerous accomplished prose writers who started out trying to be preeminently a poet, one may—or so at least it seems to me—safely conclude that he does not regard adverbs as intrinsically or universally objectionable; whereas one could not (or so at least it seems to me) get away with concluding anything to that effect if he had uttered or written the same string of lexemes and yet been one of those equally numerous accomplished prose writers who think that poetry is so much hifalutin fluff. So Murnane must have thought that adverbs were in some manner appropriate to meritorious qualities in poetry that were either absent from prose or present in prose to a much smaller extent and that adverbs enhanced these qualities or participated in them in a way that made them (adverbs, not the qualities) not infrequently indispensable. Off the top of my head (and this being a mere essay and not a work of scholarship, I think it best not to search any deeper than that-there top), I can think of only three qualities that may be uncontentiously said to distinguish poetry from prose. To give you a sense of the flavor of something that may be contentiously said to distinguish poetry from prose, I refer you to the Theophrastian figure of the three sentence ago—the prose writer who thinks of poetry as so much hifalutin fluff. That writer’s view of poetry arises from resistance to a contentious notion about poetry—that it treats of matters that are in some way too elevated or serious to be treated of in prose.  But it may be uncontentiously said of poetry that it makes more frequent use of figurative language than prose, that even its non-figurative language is more concentrated, “more pregnant with meaning,” than that of prose and that in contrast to prose it involves some attention to that practice confusingly known as prosody—the systematic treatment of the rhythm of language through stresses and vowel lengths, whether formally through meter or informally as in free verse. And in connection at least with this last quality, that of prosody, I am aware of one remark apropos of adverbs that may just furnish us some insight. The remark was made by Jorge Luis Borges when he was interviewed by William F. Buckley in 1977: “If you take an English adverb, or two English adverbs, you say for instance ‘quickly,’ slowly,’ the stress falls on the significant part of the word. Quick-ly. Slow-ly. But if you say it in Spanish, you say ‘lentamente,’ ‘rapidamente,’ then the stress falls, let’s say, on the non-significant part, the gadget.” Of course, Borges isn’t strictly correct here in terming the ly-constituted part of English adverbs and mente-constituted part not-significant, for they signify quite significantly that the word that they terminate is distinct in meaning, and distinct therein in quite a distinct way, from the adjective with which it would otherwise be identical. They signify that quickly means “in a quick way” rather than “quick,” that rapidamente means “de una manera rapida” rather than “rapida.” Still, he is right inasmuch as the “gadgets” do not participate in distinguishing the ways or manners from each other, such that nothing but long-established linguistic etiquette prevents a speaker or writer from simply tacking them onto a string of uninflected adjectives—from saying or writing “I walked slow proud and angry-ly” rather than “I walked slowly, proudly, and angrily” or “Camino lenta, orgullosa, y furiosa-mente” rather than “Camino lentamente, orgullosamente, y furiosamente.” It is this detachable, purely inflective nature of the adverbial termination that seems to have inspired Borges to term it a “gadget” by way of distinguishing it from the organic, infungible nature of the adjectives to which it is appended. Of course, plenty of adjectives are themselves partly constituted by such dead, infinitely repositionable “gadgets,”—gadgets like the prefixes “in” and “un” and the suffixes “able/ible” and “ic”—and the fact that quite by chance (I swear) only one of the adjectives that I have used since “furoisamente” does not contain such a “gadget” suggests that even the majority of English adjectives are so constituted. Still, Borges’s point is broadly very well-taken: we don’t think of an adjective as including a “gadget” as a matter of course, such that even the most “gadget”-ridden of English adjectives such as “indispensable”—which has two monosyllabic “gadgets” (“in” and “dis”) in front and one disyllabic adjective (“able”) in back, such that its only non-“gadgetic” component is its third syllable (“spens”)—sounds less “gadgety” than the humblest and most wholesome of adverbs such as the abovementioned “slowly.” And Borges’s point about English adverbs versus Spanish ones is very strictly well-taken: the fact that in English adverbs the stress always falls on some syllable of the adjectival core rather than on the adverb-signifying termination whereas in Spanish adverbs the stress always falls on the first syllable of that termination makes English adverbs invariably less obtrusive than Spanish ones. Because the English “gadget” is only monosyllabic while the Spanish “gadget” is disyllabic, an important corollary of Borges’s point is that a larger share of the English adverb is significant than the Spanish adverb; and although I am by no means sufficiently familiar with Spanish poetry to replace the conjecture that follows with a full-blown assertion to the same effect (minus its conditional modality, of course), it would seem that the confinement of its “gadget” to an unstressed monosyllable tends to render the English adverb better suited than the Spanish to the construction of the verse forms most widely employed by writers of modern European languages (including English and Spanish albeit excluding French, verse written in which is purely syllabic in meter owing to the language’s effective lack of accentual stress), inasmuch as in poetic meter (as indeed in prose, but in prose one is afforded far more flexibility in determining where the stresses fall) the stressed syllables tend to carry more significance than unstressed ones, and the meters most frequently employed by modern European-language poets—i.e., the iambic and trochaic meters— are based in immediately alternating stressed and unstressed syllables; are meters in which every unstressed syllable is always immediately preceded or followed by a stressed one and vice-versa. And now we are at last perhaps getting close to an understanding of what Murnane may have been driving at in his implication that adverbs need not be used only sparingly in poetry. For it follows that if one is committed to a system such as that of accentual-syllabic metrical versification in which significance is perforce recurrently and frequently backgrounded, and in particular to iambic and trochaic metrical accentual-syllabic versification, it follows that one is especially well served by a grammatical form such as the –ly terminating adverb that confines its less or least significance-rich part to a single unaccented syllable. To be sure, the –ly terminating adverb is not the only English grammatical form by which one is so especially well served. The kind of adjective that is formed by adding y to a noun is another—whence the notorious popularity of periphrastic epithets like “the finny tribe” in certain hypergenteel schools of old-school poetry. But like the –ly ending adverb, the –y ending adjective is at least amenable to being employed in constructions that sound natural enough not to impel the reader of or listener to a poem to assume that it is being used merely to make the line run at the proper rhythm or to the proper length. There are certain other English grammatical forms that cannot but foreground their semantic gratuitousness when they are used in metrical contexts and thereby cannot help betraying a suspicion bordering on certainty that they are being used solely for that line-maintaining purpose. The non-negative, non-emphatic periphrastic do is perhaps the most ridiculous and widely ridiculed of these. As Dr. Johnson points out somewhere in his Lives of the Poets, this form was used with especially abusive frequency in the post-Shakespearean part of the seventeenth century, and the first example that springs to my mind does hail from the run-up to the English Civil War and the pen of the so-called Cavalier Poet (and inventor of cribbage), Sir John Suckling: “Love is the fart / of every heart / It pains a man when ’tis kept close / and others doth offend when ’tis let loose.” Unlike my use of does in the sentence leading up to my quotation from his poem, Suckling’s use of doth cannot be justified on the grounds that it is adding needful emphasis that would be lacking in the non-periphrastic form of the verb of which it is a part.  If I had used hails instead of does hail in that sentence, I would have risked giving the wrong impression of the historical provenance of Suckling’s usage. Just take a look or listen at or to this hails-including version thereof: “…this form was used with especially abusive frequency in the post-Shakespearean part of the seventeenth century, and the first example that springs to mind hails from the run-up to the Civil War.” This alternative do-less version risks giving the impression that I take the run-up to the English Civil War to hail from some other part of English history than the post-Shakespearean part of the seventeenth century. The alternative do-less version of the concluding couplet from Suckling’s poem takes no such risk, as the reader or listener will readily perceive when he reads it or hears me read it thus: “It pains a man when ’tis kept close / and others offends when ’tis let loose.” In point of fact, this alternative version is not even particularly objectionable on metrical grounds, or at least it is no more objectionable on those grounds than the actual do-including version; for the first line of the couplet is in regular iambic tetrameter: “it PAINS a MAN when ’TIS kept CLOSE,” which the second line complicates beyond repair by introducing two further unaccented syllables—i.e., a minim—between the first and second feet, thus: “And OTHers doth offEND when ’TIS let LOOSE,” whereas my alternative do-less version just sort of folds the second syllable “others” into the second half of the first foot and thereby contrives to preserve, if only just barely, the simplicity of the original tetrameter meter. Why then did Suckling opt for the doth-including version at all? Why, presumably, because he meant the poem to be sung, and sung poetry can accommodate numerous successive unstressed syllables owing to musical meter’s foregrounding of the prosodic attribute known as quantity, the variation in the length of sounds—the variation coextensive with the differences between a quarter note and an eighth note, an eighth note and a sixteenth note, etc. By inserting the periphrastic “do” in the last line Suckling could accommodate a melodic line that split up the quarter notes or eighth notes of the second and third syllables of the penultimate line into eighth notes or sixteenth notes and thereby required the coverage of the same duration of music with more syllables of lexical material. Spinal Tap brilliantly satirized this sort of exploitation of periphrastic “do” to musical ends in their song “Stonehenge”—specifically in the lines “Where the banshees live and they do live well” and “Where the moon doth rise with a dragon’s face.” The occurrence of periphrastic “do” in this song is particularly apt because its lyrics are less evocative of Stonehenge itself than of the general paleoantiquarian fascination with British Paleolithic and Anglo-Saxon ruins qua supposed accessories of pre-Christian Celtic and Roman religious rites, a fascination peculiarly characteristic of Suckling’s epoch—the epoch of John Aubrey’s pioneering study of Stonehenge’s less imposing neighbor and cousin, Avebury, and Sir Thomas Browne’s sublime meditation on recently unearthed Saxon burial urns, Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial. “Something too much of this,” but only vis-à-vis the “this” of the digression from the topic of periphrastic “do,” not vis-à-vis the topic of periphrastic “do” itself qua digression from the topic of adverbs in poetry, for at bottom, and as I have already asserted, in terms of its accommodation of the attenuation of significance, the –ly-ending adverb differs from periphrastic do only in degree and not kind. Vis-à-vis the notion of poetic verse qua super-concentrated version of natural language the –ly-ending adverb is still but a pis aller and in a version of poetic verse perfectly embodying that notion, even each and every unaccented syllable would be occupied by a meaning-rich lexeme; and indeed, I don’t doubt that entire schools of versifying have been dedicated to realizing that perfect embodiment or indeed even that entire poems have succeeded in realizing it—although at the moment the only example of such a success that springs to my mind is Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool,” not a particularly good poem. And in any case, the set of –ly- ending adverbs is but a subset of the complete set of adverbs, as the very act of referring to the –ly ending adverb axiomatically attests, which suggests that at bottom there is something other than their containment of significance-poor gadgetry that scandalizes Murnane about adverbs, especially in the light of something that I have not yet managed to mention, viz. that in the sentence immediately preceding the one in which Murnane says that he decided long ago that few adverbs were needed in prose, he says that a prose sentence of his own writing that he otherwise finds unexceptionable might have been improved by its exclusion of a –ly-less adverb that it ended up including, namely, the adverb ever. After many hours of fruitless pondering of the question of what this Murnane-scandalizing something might be, I have at last arrived at a tiny, desiccated fruit-eme, a currant or raisin, of an answer that might just apply to the majority of adverbs, including –ly-less ones, although I am unhelpfully unsure whether it applies at all to ever. The answer is hinted at in the word adverb itself, even if that hint does not exhaust the scandalizing quality—namely, the quality of serving an adjective-like function in relation to words and other lexemes that are held to be undeserving of association with adjectives. According to a certain thewy commonsensical metaphysics that is espoused with equal frequency by philosophers, poets, natural scientists, and bum bailiffs and that I believe dates back at least as far as Aristotle, the world consists entirely of things, and these things are distinguishable from each other solely in virtue of their possession or lack of possession of specific qualities. (Jonathan Swift acknowledged the prevalence of this metaphysics in his own time by making the least ambitious reformers at the school of languages of Lagado in Gulliver’s Travels the propounders of a project “to shorten Discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles; because in Reality all things imaginable are but Nouns.”) And such a metaphysics naturally maps, as they say, onto exactly two classes of grammatical entities—nouns and adjectives. One sort of apple is distinguishable from another by being “a red apple” rather than “a green apple” or perhaps rather a “golden delicious apple,” which is presumably distinguishable in turn from a “golden repulsive apple.” And while according to this metaphysics things don’t just sit around being green or red or golden or delicious or repulsive—because this is after all a commonsense metaphysics that seeks to account for the world as it manifestly presents itself to us—such that according to this metaphysics things move about in relation to each other and have effects on each other, it regards these processes of movement and effectuality as being on a lower metaphysical level than things or perhaps rather as mere functions of things, such that they cannot but regard the class of grammatical entities that deal with these processes—namely, verbs—as a lower class of grammatical entities than nouns. So when a red apple falls from a tall tree onto green grass (or, say, a the philosopher’s wiggy head) the espouser of this metaphysics takes no interest in the falling as a noun-worthy entity or perhaps finds it impossible to conceive of it as such an entity. It has just occurred to me that this phenomenon is really much of the same stripe of irrationality as the kneejerk allergy to the passive voice on which I have already descanted: the very notions of a thing-like process and a noun-like verb is somehow as horrific to such people as the notions of a thing’s submitting to having something done to it and a verb-form dedicated to designating such instances of submission. This phenomenon also reminds me, albeit only in negative, of the conception of God promulgated in the first book of Kings as follows: “And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire.” Here it is asserted that God is not inside any of the named entities and implied that his presence is consubstantial with his causation of these entities, that God participates in the world as a succession of processes—that he is not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire but is in (or perhaps simply is) the bringing about of the wind and the earthquake and the fire. Our thing-and-noun-fetishizing metaphysicians are atheists vis-à-vis processes and verbs; they concede that God is not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but from this they infer not that God is in the process that brings about the wind or the earthquake or the fire but that God or the process does not exist in its own separately considerable right and that therefore the words that designate these processes, verbs like “rend,” “break,” “quake” and “burn” (doubtless gratuitous disclaimer: no form of “burn” or “quake” occurs in the passage from Scripture I just quoted) ought not to benefit from the sort of descriptive largesse furnished to nouns by adjectives, such that to furnish verbs that largesse is in a manner of speaking to lie or perhaps even—i.e., if one can regard the metaphysicians’ thing-and-noun-fetishism as a form of idolatry—to blaspheme. Accordingly, according to these metaphysicians’ lights, when one finds oneself reaching for an adverb-plus-verb combination like “brutally crush” or “burn completely,” one should check this impulse and use the verb on its own unless the English lexicon happily includes a freestanding verb that more or less precisely conveys the sense of the combination. So for “brutally crush” one might substitute “pulverize” or for “burn completely” “incinerate.” But as for the would-be user of “greedily clamber” or “sleepily peruse,” he’s TSOL and must opt for dull unqualified “clamber” or “peruse”—or perchance some impossibly wordy construction like “clamber in an effortful manner” or “peruse in a sleepy fashion.” And the metaphysicians’ stricture on adverbs presumably applies a fortiori to the application of them to adjectives, for if there is one thing, or, rather non-thing, that is more scandalous than a process or a verb that can’t bear not be treated as a thing or a noun it is undoubtedly a description or adjective that can’t bear to stand on its own and must piggyback on another description or adjective—for that is exactly what an adjective is doing when it pairs itself with an adverb (although the obligatorily prepositive positioning of such adverbs [a positioning that belies their adjectival function in invariably echoing English’s obligatory placement of adjectives before the nouns they modify {this in contrast to verb-modifying adverbs, which may either precede or follow the verb}] unhappily turns the vehicle of the metaphor upside-down). And so even so innocent a construction as “an exceedingly tall tree” or even so even-more-innocent a construction as “a very tall tree” has got to go, to be replaced by “a tall tree” or perhaps “a skyscraping tree” or “a cloud-touching tree” or the less hyperbolic if impossibly prosaic “power line-topping tree.” Of course this is all just a—well, of course at least in immediate terms it’s not exactly at thought experiment because I am not at simply toying with the implications of ideas of my own that I am basically favorably disposed to but rather toying with ideas that I am attributing to other people and that I on the whole disagree with; I suppose one might not inaptly if rather uncharitably term the whole thing an exercise in intellectual character assassination, because I am not even sure that Murnane and the far abovementioned YouTube personalities even adhere to the foundational principle I am attributing to them—i.e., the metaphysical supremacy of nouns and things—let alone its implications. And in all frankness and candor, I do not believe that a polemical stance to adverbs needs to be founded in a meta-metaphysical contempt for verbs, processes, descriptions, and adjectives; and indeed, I can think of a certain kind of adverb-usage that one might object to on quite different grounds and that indeed I myself object to on those grounds. This is the kind of usage in which the adverb is at least logically pleonastic, when it denotes a quality or process whose denotation is already bespoken by the lexeme that it is modifying. “Very unique” is the most notorious example of such a usage, and its notoriety is well deserved, for in being unique an entity is already as one-of-a-kind as it can get, such that in saying that it is “very” unique one does not make it a jot more unique than it was in its state of adverbial nudity. But eschewing “very unique” is one of those skills like riding a bicycle that one never forgets once one has learned it. There are numerous other pleonastic adverb-plus-adjective combinations that one avoids less easily because their pleonasm is more discreetly laundered. Take “deafeningly loud.” At first aural blush it simply sounds like a more vivid way of saying “very loud” and therefore sounds entirely innocent, but a moment’s reflection teaches one that it ought to be replaced either with “very loud” itself or (and especially if the sound described is very loud indeed) with “deafening” tout court, for for all the antiquity and lingering currency of the hackneyed oxymoron “deafening silence,” and for all the measurability of decibel levels far higher than those withstandable by the thickest and toughest human eardrum, to call a sound deafening is effectively to assert that it is as loud as a sound can possibly be. The same, mutatis mutandis, goes for “blindingly bright,” not to mention “sense-of-smell-annihilatingly smelly” and “sense-of-touch-annihilatingly numbing” (although I am stumped to think of an analogue applying to the sense of taste, what with its being possible to conceive of intensity of flavor along multiple axes—sweetness, spiciness, umaminess, etc.). And I suppose that, given that in our age of unpenalized stylistic slovenliness a goodly proportion of adverbial constructions that appear in print are probably of this pleonastic sort, certain meticulous stylists like Murnane might reflexively resile from them without pinpointing what is wrong with them and thereupon regard them as an adequate casus belli for an undiscriminating war against adverbs. Still, since the beginning of the twentieth century, there have been enough thing-orientated artistic and intellectual movements in the West, and even the earliest of these movements have enjoyed enough lingering prestige in the twenty-first, that I suspect that most of the present antipathy to adverbs emanates from their less-than-immediate relation to things. For my part, I have little respect for these movements or their prescriptions for the use of language, or indeed for any intellectual or artistic movement that presumes to prescribe how language is to be used, which is not to say that I am an exponent of the least metaphysically fraught official strand of philosophy, namely, nominalism—this first because I am not willing to give up on the idea that language is metaphysically implicated in the world, and second, because nominalism itself is predicated on a fetishization of nouns, as its very name attests. I would like to maintain what I believe to be two mutually non-contradictory convictions—namely, that there is some sort of tight metaphysical connection between language and the world and that there is no need whatsoever to specify a precise metaphysical function for every part of speech. I am willing to entertain the notion that the world fundamentally consists of things and their qualities, as well as the notion that it fundamentally consists of qualities, as well as the notion that it fundamentally consists of processes, as well as the notion that it consists of some mediated combination of two or more of the above. Accordingly apart from vis-à-vis pleonastic constructions like the ones I have lately described, I am quite content not only for an adjective to modify a noun but also for an adverb to modify a verb or an adjective or even another adverb as long as the modification has the ring of actuality. I have employed a construction of this last type, that adverb-plus-adverb type, quite recently in the present essay—specifically when I mentioned “the implications of ideas of my own that I am basically favorably disposed to.” I trust the reader who candidly applies my antique glassware-appraiser’s test to this construction, basically favorably, will find it wholly unexceptionable: it succinctly affirms the perfectly intelligible notion that while I may have certain minor reservations about the ideas in question, I am more partial to them than averse to them; that while I may be shallowly or intermittently ill-disposed or unfavorably disposed to them, I am at bottom or basically well-disposed or favorably disposed to them. Is this a notion particularly hard to wrap one’s head around, as they say? I trust not. But I own that the adverb-modifying adverb evinces a tendency towards a certain mode of linguistic behavior that the verb-modifying and adjective-modifying adverb do not evince and that this certain mode of linguistic behavior is vulnerable to a certain objection that I own I find not entirely uncompelling even if I ultimately reject it wholeheartedly. The tendency in question is a tendency to infinite concatenation or cascading that is attended by the generation of a sort of an endlessly self-nesting adverbial Russian doll or an endlessly self-reflecting adverbial hall of mirrors. A construction of concatenated adjectives presents no meta-conceptual problems however long the concatenation may be. A simple, happy, intelligent, and stout rich man is no harder to picture to oneself than a simple man or a stout man, autc.; despite his possession of four additional attributes he can be taken in at a mental glance just like his one attribute-sporting fellows. But a simply happily intelligently stoutly rich man is a much more complicated critter than a simple, happy, intelligent, and stout rich man. He is not merely a rich man who happens to be simple, happy, intelligent, and stout all in mutually indifferent juxtaposition, but rather a rich man whose richness is fundamentally characterized by its stoutness, which stoutness is in turn fundamentally characterized by its intelligence, which intelligence is in turn fundamentally characterized by its happiness, which happiness is in turn fundamentally characterized by its simplicity. He is also an altogether different sort of critter from any rich man whose richness is modified by this same list of adverbs arranged in a different order—in, say, for brevity’s sake (not that I’ve ever given the ghost of a pygmy owl’s hoot about brevity), reverse order: he is altogether different from a stoutly, intelligently, happily, simply rich man, for this rich man is a rich man whose richness is fundamentally characterized by its simplicity, which simplicity is in turn fundamentally characterized by its happiness, which happiness is in turn fundamentally characterized by its intelligence, which intelligence is in turn fundamentally characterized by its stoutness. Whether either such critter—let alone a critter with even more adverbially nested qualities (e.g., a calmly, sweetly, stoutly, intelligently, happily, simply rich man)—has ever actually existed or ever could exist is a question (or pair of questions) that I confess I am unable to answer, inasmuch as I am unsure whether I can even picture or otherwise comprehend such a critter or any other critter with more than two adverbially nested qualities. All the same, I would be at the very least quite hesitant to call for a ban on cascading adverbs merely on these personal empirical grounds; I would at the very least be quite hesitant to call for a ban on any grammatically coherent construction that did not denote an analytically and a priori self-contradictory state of affairs after the manner of the abovementioned very unique. I own that my reasons for granting such constructional latitude are not transcendentally defensible, but then again neither are those of my de facto adversaries. They would presumably have me believe that the purpose of language is to communicate thoughts and that the mere fact that no immediately graspable thought lurks behind a construction like “a calmly, sweetly, stoutly, intelligently, happily, simply rich man” is proof positive that it “has got no right to take its place in the human race,” or, rather, the realm of discourse generated by that race. I would maintain to the contrary that one needn’t be some sort of Derridean linguistic absolutist-cum-metasubjective nihilist to acknowledge that one often doesn’t know what thoughts lurk behind a given string of words until one has written them or uttered them. And of course they would in return fish out those hoary old Chomskyian examples of strings of words that have durably proved to be nonsensical—“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” and “Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.” And I would in return rejoin that neither of these word-strings is germane as a comparandum of the sorts of word-strings I have been defending—the first because it contains a manifest oxymoron (“colorless green”) and the second because it is manifestly ungrammatical and syntactically incoherent. I am thinking exclusively but comprehensively of manifestly grammatical and syntactically coherent constructions, constructions among which those including cascading adverbs deserve a prominent place. And I am by no means arguing that one should start plucking adverbs out of the lexical ether at random and stringing these adverbs together until one collapses at one’s desk like an overworked Chaplinesque assembly-line worker. I am merely arguing that if one finds oneself reflexively reaching for a pair or trio of adverbs in a row one should go ahead and slap them onto the page even if one cannot yet explain to oneself how they relate to each other or to the other lexemes with which they are destined to be concatenated. If on reflection—long and sober reflection, mind you—one finds that in conjunction with these other lexemes they amount to an inconceivable chimera, why then one ought to strike them from the page. Otherwise, one should let them stay there. The native genius of our language of our language permits them, and so we should give them the benefit of the doubt as a matter of course. And by “the native genius of our language” I mean the full fund of grammatical resources available to English since, say, Chaucer’s time. While I have no recollection of a chain of cascading adverbs in Chaucer’s corpus and certainly can’t be bottomed to search for such a chain in a Chaucerian concordance, I can’t imagine old Geoff would have stuck at stringing together such a chain. And I own that in giving the green light just now to every construction current in Chaucer’s time, I have doubtless let myself in for being bombarded by all sorts of constructions of which I categorically disapprove—by double negatives, for example. Of course, I would argue that double negatives’ apparent full legitimacy in the English of Chaucer’s time should no more count as a warrant for their free use in our time than very unique’s current partial legitimacy should count as a warrant for its free use therein; I would argue that double negatives should be categorically prohibited because they are intrinsically illogical. But I understand the case of the defenders of double negatives—namely, that the iteration of a negation may as easily emphasize it as nullify it, that the French language furnishes ample proof of a highly logically structured language in which double negatives consistently serve such an emphasizing function, and so on, and I would be perfectly happy, nay positively eager, to call for a truce or even to bury the hatchet with the champions of a general amnesty on double negatives, dangling participles, and so forth, if I could entertain even the faintest hope that my complaisance towards them would be met by a soupcon of complaisance from them towards me qua unabashed employer of the passive voice, cascading adverbs, and so forth. For in matters of language-usage, as in all other departments of life, hyperpharisaism is the helpmeet rather than the adversary of slovenliness. It is always the people who peremptorily insist that the precise angle at which one holds and plies one’s fork at the dinner table is a cardinal and primevally ancient article of etiquette (when it has in fact been an indifferent matter of personal preference since the fork made its two-tined debut back in the late Middle Ages) who most vociferously maintain that one should be allowed to show up at even the traditionally most formal restaurants clad in a tank-top and shorts and shod in flip-flops (or in no footwear at all). Similarly, it is always the people who would categorically proscribe certain organically unexceptionable usages of English who are most enthusiastically in favor of ignoring the most flagrant transgressions of the language’s most organically hard-and-fast rules. This is just the right moment to bring back in Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar-checker, for that selfsame grammar-checker, although a robot, behaves like just such a combination of a pedant’s pedant and a churl’s churl: for while it merely subsumes an irenic green line beneath the far-abovementioned “me and my mother” and the perhaps even more execrable “between you and I” and gives a free pass to the perennially low-rent “alright,” my typing of “primevally” three sentences ago impelled it to force me to see red, as has my slightly less recent use of “suffocatingly” and “stupefyingly.” To be sure, Word doesn’t have it in for all –ly ending adverbs, as is glaringly obvious from the red-free appearance of “merely,” “perennially,” “slightly,” and “glaringly” in the chunk of Word-word processed text still resident within the confines of my current active window. What, then, is or are the criterion or criteria by which Word is selecting certain adverbs and only certain adverbs for red-underlining? Well, first of all, it is evident that unlike the passive voice, whatever it finds objectionable in the above adverbs is something that it would have us believe all careful users of English rather than a super-careful subset thereof find objectionable, for I have been typing the present essay at home using Word’s default spelling and grammar-check settings rather than at work under the constraints of any modifications of those settings such as the above-described one by which my employer tried to rein in my use of passive constructions. For a very fleeting moment, a moment that elapsed between my conclusion of the immediately preceding sentence and my commencement of the present one, I thought the software must have imposed a syllable limit on adverb-formation and so automatically red-flagged adverbs based on adjectives of more than, say, three syllables, but my recollection of the abovementioned red-free appearance of the abovementioned “perennially” swiftly put paid to this misimpression, and the red-free appearance of “automatically” has just now reinforced the paid-putting. A much older impression of mine is that Word is simply referencing some list of adverbs that it has been taught to regard as non-standard because its designers or the usage-mavens advising them have gathered that these adverbs are not used frequently enough to merit inclusion in the club of real words. I am slowly coming to regard this impression as a misimpression by my discovery, on consulting my trusty eighth edition of  Concise Oxford Dictionary each time Word red-flags one of my adverbs, that about eight times out of ten the offending adverb is listed in that dictionary as absolutely standard. For example, all five of the red-flag adverbs I have just discussed is thus listed therein. From this I am inclined to infer that while Word may not exactly have it in for all –ly ending adverbs, it does harbor long-term unfriendly designs on them. Why am inclined to infer this? Why, because while one cannot of course expect any two corpuses of words to be exactly mutually coextensive, to contain no words not included in the other and exclude no words not excluded by the other, it seems reasonable to expect any grammatically classed sub-corpus of the lexicons of two of the Anglosphere’s leading usage authorities to overlap in large measure and to diverge only vis-à-vis words rarely used in any part of the Anglosphere. I am unsurprised to find Word red-flagging parotitis and parpen even though they occur in the Concise Oxford Dictionary because I didn’t know these nouns from Adam’s apple until I went searching for inkhorn words on concluding the preceding sentence, but I would be surprised to find Adam’s apple missing from the COD (for I am happy to report that it is not missing therefrom) or to find Adam’s apple or apple on its own being red-flagged by Word, as I am happy to report that neither of them has been in any of its occurrences in the present sentence. And if I did find Adam’s apple and apple on its own being red-flagged alongside nouns as common as Adam’s apple and apple, I would indeed begin to wonder if Word did not at harbor at least long-term unfriendly designs on nouns, if they were not at least hoping that people would give up using nouns altogether in the not-too-distant future. And such indeed is what I recently started to wonder mutatis mutandis regarding Word’s attitude to adverbs and their general usage. Of course no sooner did I begin to wonder this than I began to wonder why Word was not flagging all adverbs or at least all –ly-terminating adverbs, and perhaps owing mainly to Word’s tight association with a man who is one of the grand exponents of this strategy-genre, my collateral wonderment soon terminated in the fairly firm inference that in this selective adverb-flagging I was dealing with a so-called nudge strategy. The reader is doubtless familiar with how such a strategy works. Some worthless busybody of a mayor or governor wants to get all the children in his jurisdiction to stop eating chocolate bars qua supposed health hazard supposedly a hundred times more toxic than rat poison. He could simply order a citywide or statewide ban on the sale of chocolate bars, but that would inevitably produce a so-called backlash from the children and their parents. So he decrees instead that all supermarkets and convenience stores must display their stock of chocolate bars on shelves immediately adjacent to the ones displaying their stock of rat poison. Upon the issuing of the decree the children continue to seek out their favorite chocolate bars, but now each time one of them goes to select a chocolate bar he is obliged to set his eyes on a box of rat poison within eyeshot of it. Thus (at least so the line of thinking behind the strategy goes) a sort of Pavlovian connection between chocolate bars and rat poison is established in the children’s minds, such that soon the children are avoiding the chocolate-stroke rat poison aisles en masse, either because they are afraid of picking up a and consuming a packet of rat poison by mistake or because they have come to find chocolate as unappealing as rat poison. Of course the connection won’t be established with citywide perfection, such that at some point some hapless tyke undoubtedly will grab and consume a packet of rat poison by mistake and perish as a result, but that is but a regrettable cost of progress—if one even dare term it a “cost,” for the goal of the policy is after all to reduce the citywide consumption of chocolate bars, and a dead child is most certainly one less chocolate-bar consuming child. Word’s selective proscription of adverbs strikes me as just such a policy—which is to say, I suspect that Word is hoping that by getting people to avoid typing certain less common adverbs like stupefyingly they will eventually get them to avoid at least all ly-ending adverbs altogether.  If, after all, even a passionate adverb enthusiast such as the present writer cannot manage to keep track of which adverbs are and aren’t forbidden by Word, how much in the way of meta-adverbial consciousness can one expect from Joe Cubicle-Filler who just wants to finish bashing out today’s five hundred-word report for the boss so that he can switch back to attempting to complete Level Fifteen-Quadrillion of Undead Wizard War? After only a few such daily report out-bashing stints, he will almost inevitably get the impression that all ly-ending words are off-limits and start avoiding them as a matter of course for expediency’s sake. Of course this sinister notion of the devisers of Word as a cabal of lexicographical expurgators winnowing away an entire category of English vocables cannot but call to mind the lexicographcical anti-architects of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four enabled to issue slimmer and slimmer editions of the dictionary of Newspeak thanks to their elimination of words deemed superfluous because supposedly conceptually reducible to more primitive lexemes—bad to ungood, horrible to double-plus-ungood and the like. But, the lexicographical philosophy underlying Newspeak is but a corollary of the KISS-ian principles inculcated in Orwell’s “Politics of the English Language,” which are in turn logically downstream of the noun-fetishizing linguistic metaphysics I described a few thousand words ago, which shares headwaters with the proscription of the passive voice that I discussed at the beginning of this essay. All these  precepts and interdicts share the assumption that (and here I believe I am about to quote either Teddie Adorno or one of his translators, more or less word for word) whatever is worth saying at all can be said simply and that any detour from the path of simplicity must betoken some form of evasiveness. “If you had nothing to hide,” the promulgators of these dicta are all effectively saying, “you’d be speaking boldly in your own voice, and you wouldn’t be hiding behind all those fancy fifty-cent words. You would, linguistically speaking, be walking down the middle of the middle of the High Street in broad daylight with your hands up in the air instead of crouching behind a heap of big boxes in a warehouse down the backest of back alleys at midnight.” “Hang on a bit,” the reader or listener is bound to wish interject at this point, “the promulgators of Newspeak were after all the bad guys in Orwell’s novel. How, then, can they have ‘lived the same dream and wanted the same thing’ as Orwell himself?” Why simply because Orwell himself was without knowing it a bad guy, a man of the Devil’s party, a party Orwell, the Newspeak promulgators, and Microsoft’s grammar-censors were and are mere subsidiary demons, the leaders of factions or chapters who may be at loggerheads on minor doctrinal points but are of one mind with each other and with their master on all the major ones.  Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” is animated by the same spirit as the one that animates Word’s adverb elbow-butting grammar checker, and it is a petty, peevish, and spiteful spirit, a “hobgoblin of little minds,” as Emerson would have said—or might very well not have, as for aught I know the sage of Concord regarded the obdurate exclusion of adverbs as the wisest of consistencies.  Whatever earthly powers may be employing or employed by these spirits and whatever agenda or program these powers are purporting to pursue, their incursions on our liberty, the liberty of ordinary speakers and writers of English, must be resisted as a matter of course. And so I say and write unto you, my fellow Anglophones and Anglographs both fulltime and part-time, whenever you find yourself reaching for an adverb, or even an entire sausage-string of adverbs, you just go right ahead and plop it down on the page and--“and let the grammar-checker be damned?” you interject with breathless glee. “Not quite damned,” I caution with rueful judiciousness, “let’s say rather darned.” Because there is always a chance that the grammar checker is flagging you not for the use of the adverb per se but rather for forming the adverb with a bare –ly when it should be formed with –ally, or forming it with -ally when –illy is called for or vice-versa. And so it is always a good idea to have an older dictionary like my COD ready to hand. To be sure, I think it is the God-given right of every Anglophone or Anglograph to form an adverb from any adjective he likes regardless of whether that adverb is listed in any dictionary ever published, but certain rules for when to use a bare –ly rather than –ally and so on presumably apply as tightly to those neo-adverbs as to the dictionary-listed ones, which means that you and I ought to get those rules straight straight-away, but that straightening is both a two-pipe problem and the topic of a separate essay, and moreover a sort of essay I am not in the habit of writing, but the undeniable urgency of the matter may just require me to break that habit.  

 THE END