The Wall Street Journal is a great American newspaper, and I have a high regard for the journalists who put out its news pages. (The editorial page — well, forget it.) But surely someone who understands English grammar could have caught the absurdity buried within the front-page Journal story today headlined “A Job for Solomon: Was Bono’s Blurt
A Verb or Modifier?” The piece profiles David Solomon, the FCC’s “chief of enforcement” — in other words, the guy who gets to decide when someone is indecent enough on the air to require chastisement. Here’s the offending passage:
After a nine-month review, Mr. Solomon ruled that the exclamation survived the three-pronged test: It wasn’t sexually explicit, intended to titillate or sustained. “The performer used the word as an adjective or expletive to emphasize exclamation,” Mr. Solomon wrote. (Technically, Bono’s expletive was used as an adverb, modifying the adjective “brilliant.”) |
No, no, no. Solomon was right, and the reporter here, who butts in with a supercilious parenthesis to correct Solomon, has made a fool of herself. Bono’s expletive (what he said, apparently, is “This is really, really fucking brilliant”) is a participle, which is the adjectival form of a verb. Since it’s being used as an expletive, and not to convey the original meaning of the root verb, this pretty much doesn’t matter. But under no possible reading is it an adverb. An adverb modifies a verb, so it’s awfully hard to turn a verb into an adverb. “Fuckly”? “Fuckingly”? It just doesn’t fly.
Some people get offended by four-letter words. I get offended by grammatical illiteracy in places where people should know better.
FOLLOWUP 3/16/04: As the comments show, I owe the Journal an apology for my uncharacteristically intemperate outburst. I still think it was a little uncharitable to shanghai Mr. Solomon’s quote in this fashion, but clearly I was at least equally uncharitable in my response. Fucking — it’s a participle! It’s an adjective! And it’s an adverb! Fucking versatile word…
SECOND FOLLOWUP 3/24/04: Linguist Geoff Nunberg weighs in on our comments below and takes my side in this still-brewing controversy.
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