Dec. 29, 2012
In yesterday’s Denver
Post I found this in a guest column from Meredith C. Carroll, titled,
“Playing around with violence”:
“While I was at a supermarket in Aspen just a few days ago,
a boy not older than 4 sat in a shopping cart being pushed by his mom while
creating a war – complete with imaginary bombs and noisy explosions – between
an apple and potato. Like the planes flying overhead on 9/11, the sound of even
pretend detonations affected me
gutturally.”
Adverbs can be powerful, certainly, but they often cause
problems. This use of “gutturally” is the latter sort of adverb.
The writer obviously meant something like “it affected me at
a gut level,” or “like a punch to the gut.”
The definition of “guttural” is gruff-sounding: characterized by harsh and grating speech sounds made in
the throat or toward the back of the mouth. The connection with “gut” is there,
of course, as in the sound seems to come from deep inside the person.
Did the writer
mean she actually starting making some gruff noises upon hearing the toddler’s
fake explosions? Doubtful.
The writer
wanted to emphasize just how much the noise affected her, and “affected” just
doesn’t carry enough power… so she needed an adverb. She might have chosen
“viscerally,” I suppose, or “profoundly,” rather than using the wrong word.
Better is to
choose a different, more vivid verb, and avoid having to search for an adverb
at all.
“…pretend
detonations disturbed me… upset me… frightened me… alarmed me…” None of these
may be just right, but they avoid the misuse of “gutturally.”
Or the writer
might have rejected the passive voice in the sentence in favor of “I flinched
at the sounds of those pretend detonations.” This avoids various problems with
“Like the planes flying overhead on 9/11,” a comparison that only seems apt if
she actually heard the planes overhead that morning.
But let’s not
get into similes today.
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