DanMargarita.com

Someone who writes good but maybe not right, might be J.K. Rowling, the author of the hugely successful “Harry Potter” series. According to Jan Freeman, in her Boston Globe column, Ms. Rowling has a penchant for adverbs that some people find annoying. She quotes a Stephen King review of an earlier Potter book of which Kings says Rowling “never met [an adverb] she didn't like.” Considering his own style of writing, Mr. King also may have found the novel lacking “a sufficient number of decapitations.”

Ms. Freeman (I’m going to assume that “Jan” is a woman and not a man like the late comedian Jan Murray, although his real name was actually Murray Janofsky) also quotes King as having once said “the road to hell is paved with adverbs.” That was not a lesson that I recall from my CCD classes at St. Patrick’s School. I imagine that the adverbs are on the first part of the road before you get to the homicidal maniacs. In fact, I’d have to guess that adverbs are on one of the first rungs of hell.

Ms. Rowling’s forthcoming book is “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” Yes, I had to look up what “Hallows” meant and according to my Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, “hallow” is defined as “to make holy or set apart for holy use.” Just how that can be deathly, is beyond me.

Webster lists two definitions for the word “adverb,” one of which is too long to print here and the other is “2: ADVERBIAL.” That pretty much goes with their definition of “modifier” which says “1: one that modifies.” Duh. They pay somebody to come up with that? I remember a teacher once telling me that a good definition of a word doesn’t have the word in it, so a few things from school stuck in my head.

The article also quotes a man named Ben Yagoda (who is just two letters away from being Yoda) whose book on the parts of speech is titled “When You Catch an Adverb, Kill It” (via Mark Twain) and notes that novelists Elmore Leonard and Toni Morrison scorn the use of adverbs. They may be successful authors, but maybe they’d sell a few more copies like Ms. Rowling if they threw in a few more adverbs.

A critic from an online review called Blogcritic cited Ms. Rowling even using an adverb “Deathly” in the title. Ms. Freeman takes the critic to task, noting that the word “Deathly” as used here is in fact, an adjective. Ha! Naturally, my Webster’s defines “adjective” as “of, relating to, or functioning as an adjective.” Clearly, someone at Webster’s is just mailing it in. This has prompted me to look up the word “runner” which, as I suspected, is defined as “one who runs.”

Stephen King is certainly entitled to his opinion, since he’s been quite successful but, who can argue with Rowling’s success? She’s made 100 zillion dollars (or pounds, since she’s British) with her Harry Potter books. If it’s simply a case of throwing in adverbs to have a hit novel, my next book (which would also be my first) will be titled “Quickly, Briskly and Lazily.” From there, every other word will be an adverb. I may also eliminate nouns if they get in the way.

Adverbs tend to end in “ly” but as was noted earlier with “Deathly” just because it ends in “ly” doesn’t always make it an adverb. Yet, books with “ly” words in the title clearly sell well, perhaps Ms. Rowling is onto something. After all, the best selling book in history is:
The Holy Bible.