Does the title of this blog sound weird to you? It should! I’m sure some people might think it has to do with the Microsoft application and how much I love it. But it has nothing to do with that. It has to do with adjectives and adverbs.
Adjectives are modifiers - meaning they describe nouns. They tell us the colors, shapes, textures, etc. of nouns. And adverbs modify verbs – telling us how an action is completed. It drives me a little nutty when people use these very helpful tools incorrectly.
For instance, many years ago a big computer company had a slogan that said “Think Different” and it just made my butt boil!! What is wrong with this, you might add. To think is a verb. I know it seems weird because you aren’t doing any action, which is what verbs usually do. But it is! So if you need to describe a verb, what do you use? An adverb. That’s right! Very good! Different, my friends, is not an adverb. It’s an adjective so this phrase is grammatically incorrect. I really wanted to run around the country with a can of Krylon spray paint adding ‘ly’ to different to correct this travesty! Thank goodness they got rid of that campaign soon after. Otherwise, I would have gone insane or gotten a number of frequent flyer miles.
I was prompted to write this because the other day someone told me to think positive about a certain frustrating and unchanging situation (ahem work) and not only did I want to tell them to shove their malarkey down someone else’s throat. But I also felt the steam coming out of my ears from the horrible usage of an adjective to describe a verb. What the person should have said was ‘Think Positively”. Mind you, this person probably will never get this right in a million years but whatever. I need to get this off my chest. I wish people would just pay more attention to these things. It really makes them sound so crass and uneducated. I do suppose though that if there weren’t people out there making these mistakes, then I’d have no topics for my blog.
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