{"id":117295,"date":"2016-05-19T07:53:31","date_gmt":"2016-05-19T11:53:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=117295"},"modified":"2016-05-19T08:26:25","modified_gmt":"2016-05-19T12:26:25","slug":"on-adverbs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=117295","title":{"rendered":"“If you want to make characters sound insane, you can do worse than infect their speech with adverbs.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I love Christian Lorentzen’s writing, in general, and get excited to hear his thoughts on pretty much anything. I loved his recent piece, In Defense of Pretentiousness<\/a> (“Those who remember me as an adolescent in small-town Massachusetts likely recall an arrogant grade-grubber all too eager to quote the Virgil he\u2019d memorized the night before or to share his deep thoughts about the lyrics of Soul Asylum.”), and his tour de force: Toward a Unified Theory of Joan Didion<\/a>: it’s essential reading, and expressed some things that I have found disheartening or … disturbing … in the current love-fest around Didion, who has been sort of absorbed into the self-help culture because of her “memoirs”. Lorentzen clocks what is wrong with that, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I read his essay, because it NEEDED to be said. By someone able to say it well. <\/p>\n

Onward: I adore his latest essay: Could We Just Lose the Adverb Already?<\/a><\/p>\n

Sneak peek:<\/p>\n

But some adverbs are the most powerful words in English. We can no more escape the adverbs of time than we can escape aging. Without the adverbs of place, we wouldn\u2019t be anywhere, not even nowhere. I am in awe of \u201cyesterday\u201d and \u201ctomorrow\u201d and of \u201chere\u201d and \u201cthere.\u201d All these words can provoke potent feelings along the spectrum of sadness and happiness and are essential to getting on with the job of reporting what has or will have happened and where. They\u2019re beautiful words with a simplicity undiluted by suffixes. But their power is best spent in small doses. If you\u2019re deploying an adverb of time in every sentence, you must be writing a police report or singing the Cure\u2019s \u201cFriday I\u2019m in Love.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love Christian Lorentzen’s writing, in general, and get excited to hear his thoughts on pretty much anything. I loved his recent piece, In Defense of Pretentiousness (“Those who remember me as an adolescent in small-town Massachusetts likely recall an … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117295"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=117295"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117305,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117295\/revisions\/117305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=117295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=117295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=117295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}