[ExI] Kripke is in trouble!

[Stefano Vaj]

On 12 May 2013 21:46, Harvey Newstrom <mail at harveynewstrom.com> wrote:

> Indeed.  Steven King says to **show** how a person is behaving by
> choosing the best descriptive action verb that actually depicts the
> action.  No adverb is necessary unless the chosen verb fails to depict the
> action such that an adverb needs to be added after the fact to describe the
> action even further.  Instead of “He closed the door forcefully,” King
> would prefer “He slammed the door.”
>

In Italian or German, there is indeed an even stronger tendence, especially
in the written language of cultivated people or of authors with literary
ambitions, to express shades by adopting specialised synonims and
alterations rather than by qualifying the the most usual and generic
lexicon.

But:

i) beyond a point, this risks to sound pretentious, and more difficult to
understand for people with a poorer vocabulary (why don't you use "thou",
thus avoiding any ambiguity as to the number of people you are addressing?).

ii) the beauty of the toolbox that any given language offers us is its
richness; to deprive ourselves as a matter of principles of at least some
of the options (eg. adverb, passive forms, interjections, neologisms...)
that plausibly correct usage puts in our hand may be a stylistic exercise,
but inevitably limits the wealth and diversity of one's linguistic
inventory of tricks. Same as composing musing on in C-major and without
semitones.

Adverbs exist for a reason.
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