New Year -- Old (but fun) Obsession

Book cover for Corduroy Mansions photo by Mike Johnson, Reading Group Center (Knopf 2009)

Rounding out my trio (or more) of rants in support of the adverb -- much assailed of late -- seems to me a good way to start off the year. After this, I promise not to mention the A-word again. Well, not for a year or so, anyway.

Today I feel bound to point out that none other than gentle storytelling philosopher Alexander McCall Smith is a user.

In Corduroy Mansions, William is riding in the taxi he's hired to bring home the dog he's just acquired. Freddie de lay Hay, a Pimlico terrier, is unemployed. He's been laid off as a sniffer dog at Heathrow -- part of a failed attempt at equal opportunity for female sniffer dogs--but that's another story.

In the cab, William has mixed feelings about the responsibility he's just taken on. He wants to think, but the the taxi driver wants to talk. Thus William employs a tried and true recipe for launching the cabbie on a monologue so he can get back to mulling over his own thoughts. He asks what the taxi driver thinks of the government.

"This question," explains the narrator, "tends to offer them the maximum opportunity to express themselves in monologue, or alternatively, it gives them the impression that the fare is a secret sympathiser with the Government and therefore not to be engaged in conversation." (p 80.)

The next paragraph goes on to explain other uses William has of the technique of asking "just the right question to inhibit conversation," for instance, when one attends "cocktail parties, where one might quite reasonably wish to stand, or sit, and not be pestered by other guests seeking to make small talk..." (80-1)

On the following page, we are told that when William reached over to fasten the seat belt around Freddie, "the dog barked encouragingly." Three adverbs, three pages. Actually, quite is also an adverb, so the count is four.

With this I rest my case that the adverb is alive and well. Readers who wish to consult earlier comments on adverb use by Diana Gabaldon, Bob Mayer and Jennie Cruisie, and Dick Francis can click here. Readers may also like to see how American writer Christopher Buckley employs them.

Using a couple of the best himself, none other than Arthur Plotnik (author of Spunk and Bite, Random House 2007) supports my pro-adverb position in the comments here.