Off the beaten track travelled the adverb
AT last week’s Franschhoek Literary Festival, author Mike Nicol (a rare example of someone who can do as well as teach) gave a writing class in which he threatened to develop a medical condition should anyone use the adverb “suddenly”.
It is hardly, if ever, necessary to point out the suddenness of an occurrence. If a man falls off the table, it is usually blindingly obvious that he did so suddenly. Or, even better, just obvious. Unless he fell off the table and onto your face, in which case it would probably be blinding as well as sudden.
Sometimes one needs to go boldly or move swiftly on, and one can of course think mistakenly, but mostly adverbs are extraneous hangers-on, a scourge on the face of good, clean language. And I am suddenly seeing them everywhere.
In not one but two recent articles about the film Grace of Monaco, I read: “Kelly famously met Prince Rainier…” How do you meet someone famously? They were famous people and their meeting led to a famous marriage, making it a meeting which would later become famous, fair enough, but I still don’t see how they “famously met”. It’s a very silly phrase, if you ask me.
Even sillier are the adverbs used in romantic novels (don’t look so shocked, we’ve all been through that phase). “He stroked her face gently” or “he kissed her lips lightly” and the like. He’d hardly be stroking her face with a steamroller or kissing her like a stone from a catapult, now would he? I suppose he could stroke roughly and kiss heavily, but that would make it a different sort of book.
Going beyond silly and into the realm of idiocy are headlines such as “Journalists brutally beaten in Syria”. Is there any sort of beating which is not brutal? I suppose if the journalists had been accosted by a different band of insurgents, those of a gentler disposition who preferred cooking to the brutalising of the media, there is a chance they might have received nothing more than a tolerant slap around the ears with a pastry brush. Would the headline then have read: “Journalists mildly beaten in Syria”?
’Adverbs are extraneous hangers-on, a scourge on the face of good, clean language’
As for cookbooks, the brutalities they inflict upon language can be even harsher than the damage suffered by journalists at the hands of brutal beaters. When a recipe calls for eggs to be whisked, invariably you will find the adverb “vigorously” attached to “whisk”. Is there any other way to beat an egg?
I’m no chef, so I may be wrong about this. Perhaps there are recipes that instruct you to give the eggs a half-hearted whisking or a lame-wristed beating, but so far I haven’t seen one. It might improve things if we jumbled our clichéd adjectives up sometimes, which would give us brutally whisked eggs and journalists who received a vigorous beating.
Some adverbs are necessary in recipes, of course. When it comes to stirring, one can do it constantly, frequently or occasionally, all of which can make an important difference to the smoothness of your sauce or the height of your soufflé. The adverb that puzzles me most, however, and the one used most frequently, is “well”. “Mix the ingredients well” … “knead the dough well” … “coat the onions well”. Do they think we’d do it badly unless we were specifically instructed to do it well?