Literally ...

As my wife dozes, I have been doing some reading online (updates on her after I go get some dinner). I get James Taranto's Best of the Web Today column in my e-mail, and have enjoyed it for a few years now. A lot of his ideas are politically creative, though sometimes he tries to be a bit too cute. Not today, however, when he went after one of my least favorite grammatical solecisms, in an item called “The Wet Look.” He comments on an article by Tom Gantert of the Ann Arbor News, in which the writer says, “Peirce literally gushes about a homeless man she got to know the last six months at the shelter named ‘Vittorio.’ ” Quips Taranto: “We hope the reporter was standing back.” The image is less than pleasant, but think of it as directed towards the reporter who came up with it in the first place, rather than the poor gal subjected to it.

I very love Grammar

I suffered from quite a blindspot in class today, when I was trying to teach my students that "very" is not an adverb, but is instead an intensifier. They kept coming back at me with the notion that it is an adverb. One of them pulled out his Korean friend's electronic translator and said, "Mr. Hawking, this pocket dictionary says that 'very' is an adverb."

My argument, cribbed from my linguist friend who taught me much of what I know in grammar (in terms of terminology, not use), is that "very," is an intensifier because it is an essentially empty word, that is, it doesn't have meaning it doesn't borrow from the word it modifies. They argued from function, saying it does everything an adverb does, therefore it should be one. A few of the possibly more sensible ones asked, "who cares?" which I supported in a sense by tactically retreating , in a rather cowardly way (cowardlily?), into the claim that the traditional definition of "very" is as an adverb, that there are always debates in matters scholarly, that the academic consensus of today holds "very" to be other than adjective or adverb, and that some intelligent people disagree on this matter.

My blind spot, of course, if you have not already discerned it, came in accepting their claim that "very" does all things an adverb does. It does modify adjectives: "Hoth was very cold." It does modify adverbs: "Atalanta ran very quickly." It does not, however, and I could kick myself with the shoes of Col. Kleb to realize this after class is over, it does not modify verbs: "Thor very thundered at the evil Loki." "I very am who am." "MacArthur very wanted to return." I think this is how I make my point: the extra-credit question on their vocab quiz tomorrow will be to write one correct sentence in which "very" modifies a verb.