"This team is doing things different than they used to ..."
"He's throwing the ball pretty good right now ..."
How often have I heard statements like these recently?
I can only guess one of two things has happened: (1) the adverbs are on strike, (2) the adjectives banded together and started dressing up like adverbs and nobody noticed the difference.
I need to point out a couple of things: (1) In my experience, the main culprits have not been athletes, for whom fluent communication is not necessarily what they are supposed to major in, but rather the play-by-play announcers and sports analysts (for whom fluent communication is what they are supposed to major in), (2) these statements I'm hearing are coming from people for whom English is their first language.
I was just watching the highlights for tonight's MLB games, and George Grande, "a 39-year veteran of the broadcasting business" and currently the TV voice of the Cincinnati Reds, announced Jerry Hairston's 3rd inning home run, "He hit it pretty good to left..."
George, try this with me: "He hit it pretty well to left..." He announced Griffey's walk-off home run the same way.
Now, I certainly do not expect George, or anyone else calling a home run to double-check a grammar manual while the home run ball flies out of the park and the moment of excitement is gone forever. Obviously, fluent communication is something you learn ahead of time so that it becomes second nature, even in the heat of the moment. I'm thinking that the sports journalism community as a whole has been skipping the lessons on adverbs for some time now.
Maybe we need Tom Lehrer to come out of retirement and help us with his L-Y song:
"You're wearing your squeaky shoes
And right there taking a snooze
Is a tiger, so how do you walk on by?..."
I can just hear a sports announcer answer: "real quiet-like." Ugh. I actually can easily imagine hearing George Grande or John Rooney or Karl Ravech not only using an adjective to describe the verb "walk", but compounding the offense by using the adjective "real" to describe the adjective-masquerading-as-an-adverb "quiet" (the "-like" is added as an unconscious admission that "quiet" is the wrong form to use).
2 comments:
"he slud into third."
"he gone."
"he slud into third" -- I've never heard that one, and in any event, it's not an adverb problem, though it is an example of substandard English, like the adverb problem is.
"he gone" -- You must be a White Sox fan ;) That is known as a Hawk-ism. It's actually one of the few things I like about the guy, myself. I agree it is not good English, but it's also a colloquialism and a trademark.
Misuse of adjectives fits neither of those categories. It's not cute, it's not trademarked, it's just stupid. And what is stupid about it is that we are all becoming used to it.
By the way, this is not a new problem. In the late 50's/early 60's, Bob Newhart recorded one of his patented stand-up routines about inventions, "and how they are handled different today, than they used to be." Um, Bob? That's "different-LY".
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