The British are different from you and me: not just because they have cooler
accents (an American bias or personal opinion?) but because of their strange
use of adverbs ending in ly . Here are 3 examples from the Financial Times
of Tuesday, September 5; plus one from today’s ABC News webpage out of
London (all single and double quotation marks around specific words are my own):
Frontpage caption describing a Japanese Internet executive on trial: “a
self-made millionaire who “famously” never wore a tie;”
Page 13, describing an Austrian economist: “Mr (sic) Bernanke is “famously”
a student of the Great Depression …”
Page 23, and switching to a different adverb: “Starbucks … wants “massively”
to increase the number of coffee shops …”
Finally, from ABC’s Hilary Brown (whose “famous-famously “usage in the same
line also slipped past her editor) in, “What Princess Diana’s Butler Saw: He
describes the ‘famous’ White House dinner where she ‘famously’ danced with
John Travolta …”.
Get the picture? My teenaged kids talk a little like that: “I “totally” want
to see that movie,” or “She got “majorly” depressed when she saw her test
scores,” (the latter being from the American Heritage Dictionary of the
English Language, c 2000), but the dictionary makes clear that this is
slang.
What makes this usage, British or American, so slangy is that the words
really don’t make any sense technically or grammatically; it’s the type of
nonstandard speech you would expect from teens but not from the established
organizations quoted. How can a person BE famously, or WANT massively?
Shakespeare must be horrendously rolling in his grave.
4 comments:
Love the concept, but have to disagree with Louise on the two specific issues she raises.
"Famously," as used in the examples she cites, is not really an instance of British usage but rather of high-brow/academic usage on both sides of the Atlantic; I've noticed it in use in book reviews and essays for at least a decade. I don't think it is at all analogous to a teenager's use of "totally" as a general intensifier. Rather, it serves the useful purpose of avoiding the lengthier ways of conveying the same meaning. Offhand, I cannot think of a one-word synonym for it when used this way. Try saying, for example, "Sigmund Freud, who famously observed that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar...," without the word using "famously" and you'll see what I mean. The alternative constructions can be wordy and awkward.
-J
From the article in today's Times about the new buildings to be built at the World Trade Center:
"The risk is that his transit hub will resemble the enormous lobby he famously designed for the Milwaukee Museum of Art, exuding a look-at-me braggadocio at the expense of serviceable function."
Note use of the word "famously" in the sense we discussed.
-J
he -- famously -- designed
he, famously,.designed
gives the listener a chance to figure out what seems like an "aside" word
I agree with you there; it should be set off in commas. The adverb is not describing HOW he designed the lobby of the Milwaukee Museum but rather making an observation about the statement as a whole.
I agree that this is a departure from standard usage of the word "famous" and is syntactically questionable -- much like using the word "hopefully" when what is meant is "I am hopeful." Still, I think that this word, unlike other neologisms, is actually useful because it replaces an entire phrase and there really isn't any one-word synonym that I can think of for it.
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