The ethics of rhetoric

by Richard M. Weaver

The adverb is distinguished from the other parts of speech by its superior mobility; roughly speaking, it can locate itself anywhere in the sentence, and this affords a clue to its character. “Certainly the day is warm”; “The day certainly is warm”; “The day is certainly warm”; “The day is warm certainly” are all “normal” utterances. This superior mobility, amounting to a kind of detachment, makes the adverb peculiarly a word of judgment. Here the distinction between the adverb and the adjective seems to be that the latter depends more upon public agreement and less upon private intention in its applications. It is a matter of common observation that the adverb is used frequently to express an attitude which is the speaker’s projection of himself. “Surely the war will end soon” is not, for example, a piece of objective reporting but an expression of subjective feeling. We of course recognize degrees of difference in the personal or subjective element. Thomas Carlyle is much given to the use of the adverb, and when we study his adverbs in context, we discover that they are often little more than explosions of feeling. They are employed to make more positive, abrupt, sensational, or intense whatever his sentence is otherwise saying. Indeed, take from Carlyle his adverbs and one robs him of that great hortatory sweep which makes him one of the great preachers in English literature. On the other hand Henry James, although given to this use to comparable extent, gets a different effect from his adverbs. With him they are the exponents of scrupulous or meticulous feeling; they are often in fact words of definite measure. When James says “fully” or “quickly” or “bravely” he is usually expressing a definite perception, and sometimes the adverb will have its own phrasal modifier to give it the proper direction or limitation of sense. Therefore James’ adverbs, instead of having a merely expletive force, as do many of Carlyle’s, tend to integrate themselves with his more objective description. All this amounts to saying that adverbial “judgments” can be differently based; and the use of the adverb will affect a style accordingly.

The caution against presumptuous use of the adjective can be repeated with somewhat greater force for the adverb. It is the most tempting of all the parts of speech to question-beg with. It costs little, for instance, to say “certainly,” “surely,” or even “terribly,” “awfully,” “undoubtedly”; but it often costs a great deal to create the picture upon which these words are a justifiable verdict. Asking the reader to accept them upon the strength of simple assertion is obviously a form of taking without earning. We realize that a significant part of every speech situation is the character of the speaker; and there are characters who can risk an unproved “certainly” or “undoubtedly.” They bring to the speech situation a kind of ethical proof which accentuates their language. Carlyle’s reflective life was so intense, as we know from Sartor Resartus and other sources, that it wins for him a certain right to this asseverative style. As a general rule, though, it will be found that those who are most entitled to this credit use it least, which is to say, they prefer to make their demonstrations. We point out in summary that the adverb is frequently dependent upon the character of its user, and that, since it is often the qualifier of a qualifier, it may stand at one more remove from what we have defined as the primary symbol. This is why beginners should use it least—should use it only after they have demonstrated that they can get their results by other means.

The Verb

The verb is regularly ranked with the noun in force, and it seems that these two parts of speech express the two aspects under which we habitually see phenomena, that of determinate things and that of actions or states of being. Between them the two divide up the world at a pretty fundamental depth; and it is a commonplace of rhetorical instruction that a style made up predominantly of nouns and verbs will be a vigorous style. These are the symbols of the prime entities, words of stasis and words of movement (even when the verb is said to express a “state of being,” we accept that as a kind of modal action, a process of going on, or having existential quality), which set forth the broad circumstances of any subject of discussion. This truth is supported by the facts that the substantive is the heart of a grammatical subject and the verb of a grammatical predicate.

When we pass beyond the matter of broad categorization to look at the verb’s possibilities, we find the greatest need of instruction to lie in the verb epithet. It may be needless to impress any literate person with the verb’s relative importance, but it is necessary to point out, even to some practiced writers, that the verb itself can modify the action it asserts, or, so to put it, can carry its own epithet. Looking at the copious supply of verbs in English, we often find it possible to choose one so selective in meaning that no adverb is needed to accompany it. If we wish to assert that “the man moves quickly,” we can say, depending on the tone of our passage and the general signification, that he hastens, rushes, flies, scrambles, speeds, tears, races, bolts, to name only a few. If we wish to assert that a man is not telling the truth, we have the choice of lies, prevaricates, falsifies, distorts, exaggerates, and some others. As this may seem to treat the matter at too didactic a level, let us generalize by saying that there is such a thing as the characterizing verb, and that there is no telling how many words could have been saved, how many passages could have dispensed with a lumbering and perhaps inaccurate adverb, if this simple truth about the verb were better appreciated. The best writers of description and narration know it. Mark Twain’s most vivid passages are created largely through a frequent and perceptive use of the verb epithet. Turn to almost any page of Life on the Mississippi:

Ship channels are buoyed and lighted, and therefore it is a comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run them; clear-water rivers, with gravel bottoms, change their channels very gradually, and therefore one needs to learn them but once; but piloting becomes another matter when you apply it to vast streams like the Mississippi and the Missouri, whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are always hunting up new quarters, whose sand-bars are never at rest, whose channels are forever dodging and shirking, and whose obstructions must be confronted in all nights and all weathers without the aid of a single lighthouse or a single buoy, for there is neither light nor buoy to be found anywhere in all this three or four thousand miles of villainous river.[127]

Here there occurs not just action, but expressive action, to which something is contributed by Twain’s subtle appreciation of modal variations in the verb.

There is a rough parallelism between the use of the complex sentence, with its detail put away in subordinate constructions, and the use of the verb epithet. In both instances the user has learned to dispense with a second member of equal or nearly equal weight in order to get an effect. As the adverbial qualification is fused with the verb, so in lesser degree, of course, is the detail of the complex sentence fused with its principal assertion. These devices of economy and compression, although they may be carried to a point at which the style seems forced and unnatural, are among the most important means of rhetoric.