Ben Yagoda: When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It. The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse. NY: Broadway Books, 2007. 241 pp.
John Stuart Mill once bravely claimed that adjectives, nouns and verbs represent “fundamental categories of human thought.” It takes Ben Yagoda very little time to conclude that this fails to withstand serious scrutiny. After all, other languages classify things differently, and “any parts-of-speech scheme leaves gaping holes.” All the same, he confesses a certain fondness for this approach, no matter how inadequate it may seem to experts, self-appointed and otherwise.
Writing in a relaxed, winning, sometimes even rather breezy style, Yagoda is not overly concerned with arguing any particular brief; rather he is content with presenting his collection of aperçus and wise observations, with some of his most memorable examples taken from “Seinfeld.” The absence of an index or bibliography confirms the impression that this book is less serious in tone than his previous effort, The Sound on the Page. It is nonetheless a worthy companion to that volume.
Yagoda takes his title from Mark Twain, who had once advised a young writer to kill off the adjectives, adding, “No, I don’t mean utterly, but most of them – then the rest will be valuable.” (pp. 15-16) On related issues such as where to use commas when listing a series of adjectives, he also offers practical suggestions. He should do more in this line. I look forward to his books devoted to punctuation, margins and fonts.
He rises in defense of the much-abused adverb, his chief argument being that it is indispensable. In the popular mind, its usual marker is -ly, derived from -like. Yagoda points out that the most commonly used ones do not in fact end that way: “so,” “up,” “then,” “out,” and “now.” He calls them “stealth adverbs,” since many people do not even realize that they are members of the class at all. When it comes to “hopefully,” while he admits it in speech, he disapproves of it in careful writing, his objections chiefly being non-linguistic; he finds it “imprecise, muddy, solipsistic and dull.” (pg. 13) As for “actually,” he supplies a characteristic explanation of what it really means when a Hollywood agent tells you, “He’s actually in a meeting.” Translation: “I’m not lying to you.” (pg. 65)
In general, he recommends replacing adverbs with active verbs, hence “he shouted” instead of “he said loudly,” and “she sprinted” instead of “she ran quickly.” “In cases like these, the substitution makes for cleaner, more precise, and more forceful prose.” (pg. 51) Strunk and White could not have said it better themselves.
When it comes to articles, one can only choose among four options: “a” or “an,” “the,” or the zero-option – no article at all. Nonetheless, this is an extremely sticky proposition for students of English as a foreign language, especially if they happen to come from a language – like Russian – that works without articles. While native speakers may make all manner of mistakes, they almost never involve articles; it’s simply “in their bones” in a way that the difference between “who” and “whom” isn’t. Foreigners, on the other hand, have almost no trouble with “who/whom” while finding the correct use of articles to be one of the hardest things to master. Fortunately, though, such errors rarely lead to serious misunderstanding.
One annoying thing native speakers do sometimes do with articles is to use “an” before aspirated “h” – “an hero,” for example. Yagoda rightly calls this pretentious, though he himself was guilty of something a bit similar in The Sound on the Page, where he talked of “a overindulgent parent.” And surely John Ruskin coined “illth” as the antonym of “health,” not “wealth.” (pg. 149) These slips (and there are others) would hardly be worth mentioning, except once you’ve set yourself up as a language maven, any mistakes you make, no matter how trivial, start counting double.
Turning to pronouns, who knew that back in 1850 the English Parliament passed a law banning the official use of the expression “he or she” in favor of the generic “he”? We should all learn from this example that language use cannot be legislated. Yagoda supports the sensible alternative of using “they” as a gender-neutral, “epicene” pronoun instead of the politically correct but awkward “he or she,” and supplies examples from as far back as Shakespeare, the King James translation of the Bible, and Henry Fielding. As for solecisms like “between you and I,” he provides an amusing characterization of the phenomenon known as “hypercorrection” – “wrong but with good intentions.” (pg. 191)
Odds and ends: The most neglected part of speech, interjections, he treats with respect, tracing for example the evolution of “dude” from a slang noun to “full-fledged member of the category.” (pg. 130) In his brief chapter on nouns (a class for which he professes little affection), who would have guessed that “the top noun, ‘time,’ comes in at an unimpressive number sixty-six” on a list of frequently-used words? (pg. 153) Dan Brown receives some well-deserved criticism for mixing up the contrary-to-fact “if it were” with the merely unknown “if it was.” I could continue, but since Yagoda concludes his book abruptly without any summing up, I will follow suit and end this review the same way too.
Related reviews: David Crystal: The Stories of English; Steven King: On Writing; Bill Bryson: The Mother Tongue.
© Hamilton Beck
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