“Ily” – a word that qualifies–or adverbs–an adverb | Hacker News Reader

“Ily” – a word that qualifies–or adverbs–an adverb

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5 pointsfirloop16 comments

The author claim that they're not re-inventing adverbs, but rather want a word that modifies another adverb (someone in the comments suggests an "adadverb"). But the example doesn't show this:

> “He quickly ate the mango in a distracted manner,” I wanted to write, “He distractedily quickly ate the mango,” because, among other reasons, I wanted to be more concise.

But in the first sentence, "quickly" and "distracted manner" both modify "ate," and so they are both simply adverbs.

While there could be some merit in trying to suggest a causal relationship between the two adverbs ("Because he was distracted, he ate the mango quickly"), that doesn't seem to be what's being suggested either.

So I can't really see the purpose of this. How does "distracted" modify "quickly" in the example? How is "quickly" itself different, now that it's been modified? I don't think it is, what's different is the way the mango is being eaten, so they are both simply adverbs for the same verb.

In any case, adverbs can already modify adverbs:

"He burped enormously loudly."

Yeah, that sentence should look like this: "He distractedily and quickly ate the mango", and then it's clear both adverbs modify the same verb. Unless the author was trying to pull the equivalent of "he is distractedily quick", in which case I don't know what their original sentence would mean anymore.

Ok, but the adverb is "distractedly."

The "ily" in "distractedily" isn't doing anything.

And "distractedly quickly" is perfectly cromulent casual English, even if not something you'd likely want in formal writing.

The author definitely seems to want to modify the adverb, but "distractedly quickly" is semantically still nonsense even if you use "ly" instead of the ungrammatical "ily". "Distractingly quickly" would be meaningful though ("I was distracted by how quickly he ate the mango"). I wonder if the author is just trolling here.

Yeah, the author doesn't seem to recognize some adverbs when he sees them. I also agree that distractedly modifies the verb, not the other verb. What we're looking at is sequences that together modify the verb rather than using prepositions.

And why is it necessesary to change the derivational morphology when you could just write sequences or conjunctions of adverbs?

Um,

> acceleratingily increasing

Acceleratingly increasing (without the "i") is already grammatical English with the desired meaning, right?

> unconsciousily habitually

"Unconsciously habitually"

> endearingily awkwardly

"Endearingly awkwardly"

Drop the "i"s and those are all grammatically correct. That's a rather low bar to clear though!

Those are just adverbs. Poorly written adverbs.

If you remove the 'i' from "ily", then you get the sentence, "He distractedly quickly ate the mango...," which seems grammatical to me.

In any case, I'm not sure why some high schooler's ill-considered blog post is Hacker News.

Tao Lin is annoying in his own right, but he's not a high schooler.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Lin

The problem is interesting, but the solution is too confusing because an -ily word looks and sounds too much like an adverb with an epenthesis. In speech (YMMV because regional accents) I would just think that the person said "distractedly", changed their mind, and said "quickly" instead.

Makes me wonder if any language existed/exists that does have such syntactic sugar for "<adverb> <action> in a <adjective> way". Seems like something that might have come up.

Oh god what is with those em dashes (—) and spacing? Is "foo—bar baz—quux" correctly spaced? Because it took me a minute to parse the title (and the same line in the article). For a while I was thinking that "qualifies—or" and "adverbs—an" are some advanced concepts from linguistic equivalent of algebra. But it turns out that the sentence is just "qualifies, or adverbs, an adverb".

Some style guides let you put spaces on both sides of an em dash, others want spaces on neither side. No style guide wants spacing on only one side, and the title is correct with its lack of spacing on the em-dashes.

I understand the first example-the awkward way that it’s done is endearing-but the second one seems like a confusing oxymoron. Can someone explain what it’s trying to say?

I was going to say something similar. The best, non-oxymoron, interpretation I can come up with is:

> A longily concisely written account of skydiving.

Since these are intended as adverbs on adverbs (which, by the way, is already how adverbs work), my most generous interpretation is:

> A concisely written account of skydiving which took a long time to write (or to write concisely?).

this is already a thing though, it sounds like he thinks he invented it? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ily

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