The Unfaithful Inaugural Adverb

Nobody should be surprised that the most controversial moment in Tuesday's presidential inauguration ceremony was caused by an adverb.

"The road to hell," Stephen King has said, "is paved with adverbs." And now Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. would likely agree.

True, when it comes to the parts of speech, nouns and verbs are the obvious troublemakers. After all, they grab all the headlines and crawl along the bottom of the screen on the cable news channels. But for all that, nouns and verbs can generally be counted on to know exactly where they stand in a sentence.

Not so with adverbs, which can show up almost anywhere. Adverbs are wayward, fickle, vagrant. In some ways, they're throwbacks to a wilder linguistic time when word endings in English (inflections) were more important than word order.

Now as every American schoolchild knows, the Constitution requires a new president to say, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States . . ..”

On Tuesday, in front of a million or so people on the Mall in D.C., Chief Justice Roberts and Mr. Obama solemnly made it past the first adverb without much difficulty. That's often the way it goes. But just when you think you're in full command of the syntax, another adverb sneaks up on you, and--bang!--the verbal parade has suddenly been rerouted. Before you know it, tuba players are tumbling into the Aloha float, majorettes are colliding with Clydesdales, and the Suurimmaanitchuat Eskimo Dance Group has been spirited away to Columbia Heights.

Well, not really--not at all. In most cases, a floating adverb will pass entirely unnoticed. Unless it occurs at a presidential inauguration.

For Roberts, the oath came undone when that second adverb made an impish leap to the end of the clause: " . . . that I will execute the office of President to the United States faithfully . . ..” Yes, I know. He got the preposition wrong as well. But as any second-language learner will tell you, English prepositions are pesky but rarely disruptive. No, it was that slippery adverb that broke the spell.

Roberts then backed up in an effort to rein in the modifier, but that only appeared (or rather, appeared only) to aggravate matters: “Faithfully the office of President of the United States . . ..”

At this point the new president graciously echoed the chief justice’s first error, sliding “faithfully” to the end: "the office of President of the United States faithfully . . .”

Such word play could have gone on longer. By my count, the adverb "faithfully" might have shown up in another two or three spots in that same short clause--each version clear and grammatically correct. Of course only one version appears in Article Two of the United States Constitution. And that's why this evening Chief Justice Roberts was ushered into the Map Room of the White House to re-administer the oath to President Obama.

For a little perspective on the matter, we turn to Mark Twain, writing in The Atlantic Monthly in June 1880: "To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference; it can never give me a pang. . . . There are subtleties which I cannot master at all--they confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me--and this adverb plague is one of them."

More About Adverbs:

• What Is a Sentence Adverb?
• Adding Adjectives and Adverbs to the Basic Sentence Unit
• Sentence Combining With Adjectives and Adverbs

Image: Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. re-administering the oath of office to President Barack Obama. Photo courtesy of the White House.