Opinion: Whatever happened to "ly" ?

In recent years, there’s an odd trend that I’ve been noticing. Adverbs seem to be getting replaced by adjectives, and at an increasingly fast rate. I see signs that say things like this:

Drive Safe

Now when I was at school, we’d have been given a hard time for writing that. We’d have been told in no uncertain terms that it should have been:

Drive Safely

I was trying to work out if it was more of a US-based thing. I see it far more often in US-based writing, yet it’s also happening in the UK, Australia, and others as well.

Puzzled by this, I was starting to wonder if it was just me, and, more importantly:

Whatever happened to “ly” ?

Turns out that I’m not alone in wondering this. This Quora discussion asked Why have so many people stopped using adverbs and instead use adjectives, such as “quick” instead of “quickly”?

The article argues that it’s part of a very long-term trend, and that you notice it more as you age, and as you visit other places and come across other dialects.

More concerning(ly), this article asks: Is it poor style to use adverbs ending in “ly” in formal writing? Some commenting on the article make a more curious claim: Some grammarians consider “ly” ending adverbs as bad style in formal writing.

Now I don’t see specific evidence to support that, and one person commented that it was primarily advice for sci-fi writers.

A recent article in the Guardian asks:  Where have all the adverbs gone? And how did they go?

The author says: Meanwhile, in everyday parlance in America, people are quite happy to do things “real quick”. I hope that doesn’t catch on here. There’s plenty of time to bother saying “really quickly”. 

At least it appears that I’m not the only one that’s wondering where “ly” went. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

2019-05-28