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Nancy Bauer
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This could be titled "in defence of the adjective and adverb." Or maybe "musing about two maligned parts of speech." The received opinion is that you use them sparingly. In Elements of Style, Strunk and White advise, "Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs." William Zinsser in On Writing Well pontificates, "Most adverbs are unnecessary "¦ Most adjectives are also unnecessary." Zinsser goes on to knock down strawmen with examples of unnecessary adverbs.

I got thinking about the subject at a seminar on storytelling given by Dennis Dewey. He was able to re-interpret the meaning of passages in the Gospel of Mark by a nod of his head or a turn-up of his lips. He pointed out that a storyteller can use a tone of voice, a body pose, a dramatic movement to augment his tale. Dewey demonstrated how he could even change the meaning of a passage. If a character is being ironic in his statement, the storyteller winks. A writer can't do that, so he uses the adverb "ironically." Various advisors say that a writer ought to be clever enough to make the dialogue indicate irony.

Great writers use adverbs and adjectives - and not sparingly either. I open books at random. Jane Austen writes in Emma, "'My poor dear Isabella,' said he, fondly taking her hand." Zinsser might say that since Mr. Woodhouse calls Isabella "My poor dear," the "fondly" isn't necessary. But of course it is. In Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry writes, "At last the good little man gathered up his letters and bowing apologetically, disappointedly, lunged off down the street again."

Writers now use figures of speech to convey what an adjective or adverb can do. This trick can become aggravating, calling attention to its own cleverness. In Toni Morrison's Beloved a gravestone is described: "Pink as a fingernail" and "dawn-coloured stone studded with star chips." Nothing is just pink. It's prose as purple as - what? Lilac blossoms? Week-old bruise? I'm probably just envious of the ability.

Adjectives and adverbs are susceptible to becoming clichés with certain verbs and nouns, perhaps because their first use was so descriptive. Except comically, writers can't have a character "stride purposefully across the room." Dawns can't be "misty." But metaphors quickly become clichés as well.

The Boston Globe obituary of Edward Lathem, the editor of Robert Frost's poetry, revived an old controversy. Lathem had standardized Frost's punctuation. He added a comma after dark in "The woods are lovely, dark, and deep." Critics of Lathem argued that the comma "turned the phrase into a list of three adjectives, rather than allowing the phrase 'dark and deep' to modify lovely." Either way, three adjectives or an adjective and two adverbs, it is a lovely line.

I've been thinking about this because I was infected with Strunk and White's advice and used to strive not to use adjectives and adverbs. Now I read in Thomas and Turner's Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose that they don't trust such proscriptions either because adjectives are just "surface marks." Their aim is to reach even deeper into the real "elements," not just these "surface marks."

Linguists have been trying to get to these elements. They have figured out that children learn nouns first, adjectives after because nouns are specific, adjectives are general. This suggests that nouns are more important. Children don't make as many mistakes with the meaning of nouns as they do with the meaning of adjectives. But Gasser and Smith have postulated that this is because of the way parents teach words to their children. They say, "That is a dog," but they don't say, "See how quickly Spot runs." Or, "Over there is a wise man."

Another linguistic study aimed to demonstrate that verbs have more power to influence than do adverbs. When you see someone smile, the smile muscles in your face also react. Foroni and Semin "have shown that the very same resonance induced by exposure to facial expressions is also induced by exposure to verbs that unambiguously map affective facial expressions of smiling and frowning "¦ This was not found in the case of adjectives."

In Captain Corelli's Mandolin, the amateur historian Dr. Iannis is frustrated because he can't achieve the austere Olympian tone of the professional. He changes his title from A New History of Cephallonia to A Personal History of Cephallonia. "Now he could forget about leaving out the loaded adjectives ..."

Could it be that fiction, poetry and personal non-fiction can use adjectives and adverbs with abandon, but formal non-fiction must restrain itself? Dr. Iannis writes, "Here was Apollo, slayer of the Python, guardian of the navel of the earth, beautiful, youthful, wise, just, strong, hyperbolically bisexual "¦" Dr. Iannis' creator, Louis de Bernières, is having fun with adjectives and one strong adverb.

Nancy Bauer is an arts columnist who lives in Fredericton. She can be reached at wbauer@nbnet.nb.ca.