> My college philosophy professor made a big deal in class about the uselessness of most adverbs in general usage. The guy had the biggest intellect on our campus, and he has a point about how much waste overuse of quantifiers like very, quite, greatly, etc.
>
> But i think, at least for me, to rid my speech of such extras would require so much thought about HOW i was saying anything that i would perpetually forget WHAT i was saying.
>
> Mi "and i already do that enough" ke

I don't like it when people go nutso pedantic like this. Particularly the people that insist that a word be used always and only to express its dictionary meaning, even in conversation. And I can say this because I used to be one of them. The spoken word communicates meaning in a variety of ways... the actual written definition being one that sometimes doesn't even come into play. Thus you get words like "really?", the meaning of which every English speaker understands, even though you won't find it in a dictionary defined as "acknowledgement that the event just described is unexpected, and encouragement to the other party to tell more."

When you think about it, it's actually pretty incredible that we can process linguistic elements like this, taking tone, context, and definition all into play and understanding the true meaning of the words given immediately. An alien or computer that analyzed a conversation solely on the basis of the words' literal meanings would be very confused.

Now, if your professor was talking primarily about written language, I wholly agree. Different rules apply, and there your aim should be to express yourself as clearly as possible in as few words as possible. Unnecessary quantifiers weaken a sentence tremendously. But there's no need for me to rant on that, since others have done it longer and better.

Lire"over-attached to adverbs myself"lyn