Snippets

About Adverbs!

A/N: To be read as it was written, with one's tongue in one's cheek"

When my great, great, great .....great, grandfather worked as a navigator to Julius Caesar in 44BC and they aborted the planned invasion of Ancient Britain because they were frightened off by the hordes of howling blue-woaded Britons waiting on the beach for them to land, Caesar called a conference on the command galley.

His scribe was there with a hammer and freshly sharpened chisel to take notes on a lump of Portland Stone they had picked up on the way around the coast.

"'Faeces," Caesar shouted over their heads (they didn't say 'shit' in those days), his hands pulling at his toga fit to tear it to shreds.

 "Pray tell me what do I tell the Emperor to explain our misadventure? To say there were hordes of bestial Britons waiting for us sounds lame; after all we did gut the Gauls?'

My ancestor poked his arm in the air feeling very self conscious. Caesar noticed him, raised his eyebrows and said,"'Speak."

 "Begging your pardon Sir, but I might be able to help. ...Whenever I'm late in docking I carve the reason in the logbook as 'weather was rough'. But when I'm delayed by many hours or days even. I add something to the verb 'to be' in my logbook and carve 'weather was very rough.'  It works every time and stops  the dock masters asking awkward questions."

"That's it, that's the answer," Caesar immediately appreciated the simplicity of this solution and threw his hands in the air, crying out with joy to the winds and waves. 'We have the answer and can save ourselves from the Emperor's wrath simply  by extending our grammar. We will call them adverbs. What's your first name my worthy man?"

Grandad, one hundred and twenty three times removed, fell to his knees to closely inspect the stitching on the great man's sandals.

" My name is Julian Sir, but most of my friends call me Jules or July for short.

"July, I like it." The soon to be a greater man clapped his hands, called his scribe to spit on his hands and start chiselling into the rocky tablet.

"Take a decree. As a tribute to Julian Thomson for inventing the adverb and saving my neck for aborting this mission, henceforward this month will be known as July in his honour."

"But Sire," the astronomer royal protested, "We don't have room in the calendar for another month, we already have ten and another would make eleven, which is a difficult expression for anybody to say in Latin. Not even the brightest kids at Eton, those who go on to the Bullingdon Club at Oxford and thence become Prime Ministers of the future, can say 'eleven' properly. Pardon me Sire for mentioning it."

"Damn it man they'll have to take shorter lunches and learn how to say it." Caesar exclaimed making an over enthusiastic sweep of his arm that accidentally pushed the Ast-Roy over the side of the galley and into the sea.

This mishap occurred just as a lump of space rock fell to earth and landed directly on top of the luckless star gazer, drowning him. Caesar was unhappy about the loss of his time keeper, but not his argument.

"Where are you scribe, take another note."

 "Ready Sire". Caesar made his second decree of the day

"Henceforward all lumps of space rock falling to earth are to be known as 'astroyds' in honour of our late departed astronomer royal - and so it was from that momentous day forward that not only did we have a name for geological space debris, but we had the month of July in the calendar and adverbs in the grammar too!  

With such a personal heritage in adverbs, I am unable to fully agree with the Puritan editors of Grammarly and similar editing softwares that suggest  adverbs, adjectives and any word that gives a greater meaning, sense or sensitivity to a sentence should be shut out simply because of what they are? It's an affront to the memory of Julius Caesar for one thing.

In the same way that an excess of eggs in the diet are bad for one's health, a little, used sparingly (pardon the adverb) can do one good. And so it should be with adverbs....Ex Hobnails semper aliquid novi!