Adverb English

Why do young people talk almost exclusively in adverbs?

Springtime by Claude Monet (1872)

When the British retailer, W.H. Smith, rebranded its logo last year, confusion and bafflement ensued.

The high street fixture, its Times New Roman logo mostly unchanged since 1792, earned its reputation by selling books, stationery, and for fleecing bleary-eyed travellers in airports. Through sheer zombie persistence, W.H. Smith remains a constant of British retail. Never mind the threadbare carpets, the general dilapidation, or the desperate staff forced to offer you a bottle of knock-off perfume with your twenty Lambert and Butler.

W.H. Smith endures because its business model concentrates on a captive audience. Go to an airport or a hospital—any place in which people cannot escape—and you'll find a W.H. Smith reliably charging double for a Lucozade Sport. W.H. Smith will outlive Great Britain. The retailer's existence—puzzling to the most scientific of minds—defies natural law.

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Last year, creative designers attempted to play God. They sanded off the logo's regnant edges and stripped 'Smiths' altogether. The dynamic branding screamed minimalism: a plain, white 'WHS' stamped on to a blue background.

I'd imagine the big revelation underwhelmed those paying for the work. 'That's interesting.' Or 'It's certainly different.'

Mockery ensued. 'Baffling' said one. 'It looks like the NHS logo,' observed another.

No doubt the designers plotted a revolution in design. Of course, these 'creatives'—invariably young and invariably uncreative—fancied their vandalism as 'forward thinking' and 'dynamic.' I'll wager at least one thought the new logo addressed the plight of some faraway progressive cause to which they subscribe. The public, unschooled in the most voguish developments in design, concluded: The new logo is shit.

W.H. Smith soon backtracked. Passive-aggressive defences of the staid new logo melted into sulky denial. It's just a trial, they mewled.

A breathless spokesman revealed the truth. Or some addled version of the truth. The fresh signs, they revealed, were 'designed to raise awareness of the products W.H. Smith sells.' What else, I wonder, is a shop sign meant to achieve?

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The phrase 'raising awareness' is one of a litany of linguistic evasions which say nothing. By shoehorning that ghastly phrase into a sentence, the speaker hopes to evade criticism. Reader, I'm not ploughing through a duty-free bottle of Chateau le Peuy Saincrit in the obscene Bulgarian sunshine. I'm raising awareness of the plight of southern French winemakers.

That passive-aggressive statement of the obvious—our shop sign raises awareness of our shop—you plebeian fools—crystallises the creative industry's age problem.

Three-quarters of the creative industry is under 45. Perhaps this age gap (not the sexually consensual and fun kind) explains why so much of what we see and hear is cliché-riddled evasive hoo-hah.

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When talking to anyone under 45, I mentally add a question mark to the end of their sentence. Millennials and Zoomers avoid declarative sentences. Listen. Almost every utterance sounds like a question. Further to this quirk, I note the adverbs and filler words. Young people stuff their speech with 'basically,' 'actually,' 'literally,' and 'like.' Zoomers are especially militant. They eschew capital letters. Capital letters are grammatical fascism. Full stops reveal a latent proclivity for Zyklon-B. Influencers add another tic to this repertoire of anxiety and unsurety. They crackle their voice as if a frog has lodged in their throat.

The first thing one learns in any decent writing school is to write with nouns and verbs, to avoid the passive voice, and—the compensatory advice of frustrated critics—to write simply.

Adverbs soften and debone. Adverbs leech vivid writing of its power and poise. Adverbs are the fence-sitting pacifists of the English language. Adverb English, that strange sociolect of youth, is the language of anxiety.

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Back in our school days, my generation was subject to a well-intentioned social experiment. In a nutshell, self-esteem ruled the day. This prevailing orthodoxy thought low self-esteem was the harbinger of social ills from teenaged pregnancy through to pollution. Teachers threw out their aggressive red pens for more soothing greens. Many parents praised a grade 'D' as if it were a grade 'A'. In this magical land, unwarranted praise and celebration were the route to Utopia.

As you may have noticed, this patent madness raised two generations who think rather highly of themselves. Studies show that American and British youth are the best at thinking they are the best. That's despite lagging far behind other nations in competence. Yes, we excel at thinking we excel.

These are the praise-addled generations shielded from the self-esteem-sapping possibility of getting an answer wrong. One study showed that rising intonation—talking as if everything is a question—stems from the fear of getting an answer wrong. You see, a wrong answer meant peril.

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The results are in. A censorious, hair-triggered youth who talk in evasions and euphemism. Who are famously criticism-avoidant because they learned that criticism could permanently maim the criticised.

And yet, our culture still contends that wrong answers and opinions are so dangerous they may forever corrupt those they subject. The populace, wilting flowers all, must be protected in their innocence lest they contract expressional leprosy. The lepers must be cast out into their colonies.

Ironically, the self-esteem era got it backwards. One builds true self esteem by trying, failing, and gaining competence. Not by hearing how one's sponge painting of a three-legged dog is a Monet worthy of the Louvre.

If only we could raise awareness of this misguided, insidious hokum. We'd live in Elysium.

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