adverbophobia
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From adverb + -o- + -phobia. Rare before the 21st century.
Noun
[edit]adverbophobia (uncountable)
- (informal, sometimes humorous) An excessive aversion to the use of adverbs, especially in writing literature.
- 2016 November 12, SomeGuyNamedTony, “The Dune, and Stephen King's adverbophobia”, in StephenKing.com Message Board[1]:
- For some reason when I compare King to a living Shakespeare people think I'm joking, or that I'm wrong, but I truly believe this. […] Stephen King's biggest fear is adverbs. He irrationally hates them. So much so that the preceding sentence just made him cringe. And I think it makes his work wonderful to read. […] When it comes down to it, even if the Constant Reader doesn't know why, King has always had a very distinctive voice. I posit that his voice is the direct result of his aversion to adverbs. It may not be just because it's unnatural (people speak with adverbs...Constantly). In fact, I don't think it's that at all, as I think King's dialogue is known for sounding incredibly natural. I think it's because an aversion to adverbs makes it so that you need to review your writing. Closely. And frequently. And repetitively. And it makes it so your writing is so tight that there are no mistakes at all.
- 2024, Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Truth About English Grammar, Polity Press, →ISBN, pages 73-75:
- Adverbophobia / That leads us to the puzzling phenomenon of all the warnings in the how-to-write books. Why do they fear adverbs so much […] Well, it is my duty to warn you that the advice about avoiding adverbs is mistaken, for two rather obvious reasons. The first reason is that you can’t normally get rid of an adverb by making a better choice of verb, adjective, or whatever, because there just isn’t one. You can’t avoid the adverb rapidly in a sentence like It rapidly corroded by finding a verb that means “undergo corrosion in a short space of time”; […] And the second reason for not recommending avoidance of adverbs is that even if some inexperienced writers use adverbs where they didn’t need to (perhaps where they’re redundant, or maybe just to increase the word count of a required paper), that doesn’t mean everyone else should be told to do without adverbs all the time! Suppose it’s true that some dimwit tends to write He shouted loudly, not realizing that shouting is always loud, or writes We hurried off quickly because of a failure to understand what hurrying is. That shouldn’t be allowed to ruin it for the rest of us! If I choose to write He lingered uneasily or She responded bitterly, it’s nobody’s business but mine, and I don’t want purported writing experts telling me to take those adverbs out simply because of adverbophobia. […] Adverbs are a familiar feature of everybody’s writing. Stephen King asserts that the road to hell is paved with adverbs, but the moment he gets back to doing what he’s good at – writing stories of suspense and horror – he uses adverbs at will, just like the rest of us. In fact somewhat more. I checked quite a few pages of his writing, and around 8 percent was typical for him, both before and after he published On Writing. The first adverb in Insomnia (1994) is in line 1; the first one in Under the Dome (2009) is in line 3. Check for yourself.