Heard the one about the adverbs?

An NPR reporter, a music professor and a grammar columnist walk into

a bar. The NPR reporter says to the bartender, “I’d like a drink

served strongly.” The music professor says to the bartender, “I would

like a beer served frothily.” The grammar columnist says to the

bartender, “It’s OK. I’m driving, so these two won’t turn up on the

side of the road deadly.”

As you can see, crafting side-splitting jokes is every bit as easy

as using adverbs correctly. And for me, they’re both as common as the

opportunity to point out the errors of public-broadcasting brainiacs

and real-live, bona fide college professors.

This orgy of hilarity began one recent morning when an NPR

reporter, whose name I didn’t catch, was interviewing a blue-collar

worker about something I can’t remember. The NPR reporter asked

whether sometimes some resources “get spread more thinly.” A few

minutes later, the interviewee said that, indeed, these resources

“get stretched thin.”

The very same week, an Orange County university professor sent me

an e-mail about something I’d written in my column.

“Your penultimate paragraph ends,” the professor wrote, brazenly

flaunting his knowledge of the word “penultimate” (it means “next to

last” or “second to last”), “‘... the people reading it won’t know

any different.’ Obviously you mean either ‘differently’ or

‘difference,’ depending on knowing differently or recognizing a

difference, right?”

Wrong.

Now, for those of you who always thought you had a good grasp of

adverbs but who now think the English language is such a mess that we

should resort to a system of squeals and grunts, take heart. This

stuff may look painful, but you already understand that it doesn’t

look “painfully,” and that’s all you really need to know to keep up

with professors and NPR reporters.

The basic rule governing these situations is that adjectives

modify nouns and adverbs modify verbs. (Adverbs also modify

adjectives, prepositions and other adverbs, but try not to think

about that now.) Therefore, my morning walk might be brisk, but

that’s because I walk briskly. This is pretty easy stuff once you get

the hang of it. But in some cases, adverbs are downright diabolical.

One such instance involves linking verbs. A linking verb is one

that that connects a descriptive word with a subject. “Seem” is a

good example. It’s a verb, obviously, but it usually precedes an

adjective and not an adverb. “He seemed nervously” or “He seemed

nervous”? The choice is clear. A case like this calls for an

adjective because the linking verb connects the adjectives directly

to a noun.

But though these linking verbs can be a good clue, other danger

zones don’t label their hazards as clearly. For example, when you

have a verb and the object of a verb, such as “beat me,” in the

sentence -- “The reporter beat me” -- followed by a descriptor, that

descriptor could be referring to the verb or the object. “The

reporter beat me senseless” describes the “me” when he was done with

me. “The reporter beat me senselessly” describes the manner in which

he administered the beating.

In the words of usage guru Bryan Garner, “‘chop the onions fine,’

does not describe the manner of chopping but the things chopped.”

Ditto, Garner notes, for meat sliced thin (not thinly) and “open your

mouth wide” (not widely).

Phrases such as “they don’t know any different” are even trickier

because the word being modified is absent from the sentence. It’s

implied: “anything different.” It’s not easy to notice that the thing

being modified is missing. But it’s relatively easy to ask yourself

whether the modifier describes the manner in which the verb is being

performed. It is not the knowing that is being done differently. It’s

the thing known or unknown that is different.

Of course, one of the options offered by our professor friend was

grammatically solid: “The people reading won’t know any difference.”

But that’s not what I chose to focus today’s column on. Because, you

see, when it comes to NPR reporters and professors, whose very

existence makes me feel inferior, revenge is a dish best served both

cold and coldly.

* JUNE CASAGRANDE is a freelance writer. She can be reached at

[email protected].