Grammar in the News

The Solipsist would like to give a shout-out to Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer for illustrating the importance of adverbs in everyday life.

In Flores-Figueroa v. United States, the question before the court was whether the government could charge illegal immigrants with aggravated identity theft (a serious crime) if they present an employer with a false social security number that, unbeknownst to the accused, actually belongs to a real person.  In other words, is the simple fact that the number does belong to a real person grounds enough to charge someone with an offense that is usually associated with criminals stealing social security numbers for the purposes of, say, running up credit card bills.

The court found that it was not, that these immigrants had no intent to defraud the people whose social security numbers they happened to use.  From today's Times:

"Justice Stephen G. Breyer, in his opinion for the court, said the case should be decided by applying 'ordinary English grammar' to the text of the law, which applies when an offender 'knowingly transfers, possesses or uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person.

"The government had argued that the 'knowingly' requirement applied only to the verbs in question.  Justice Breyer rejected that interpretation, saying that 'it seems natural to read the statute's word "knowingly" as applying to all the listed elements of the crime.'

"He gave examples from everyday life to support this view.  'If we say that someone knowingly ate a sandwich with cheese,' Justice Breyer wrote, 'we normally assume that the person knew both that he was eating a sandwich and that it contained cheese.'"

In grammatical terms, Breyer is stating that adverbs modify not just verbs but entire predicates.  Grammarians can debate the correctness of this conclusion.  But we are impressed by the amount of weight that the adverb carries in this case.

Adverbs, you see, are an often derided part of speech.  No less an authority than Stephen King has exhorted aspiring writers to avoid adverbs whenever possible, and this is good advice.  Consider all the empty "very"s we employ on a daily basis, to say nothing of the "really"s, "generally"s, "actually"s, and (a personal bugaboo) "basically"s.  Excessive adverb use also leads to redundancy: We have all-too-much experience of writing students who think they're being descriptive when they explain that someone "whispered quietly" or "crept slowly."

But today, the Supreme Court of the United States has upheld the virtue of a well-placed adverb.  There is, they say, a fundamental difference between acts committed "knowingly" and "unknowingly."  And whether the law's writers intended for the act to be interpreted this way, once they committed that adverb to paper, they--knowingly or not--limited the crime that a person could commit.