Jason Whitlock truly loves adverbs

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Award-winning sportswriter Rick Reilly hates adverbs. “I would rather be coated in chicken drippings and dropped in a leopard den than use adverbs,” he writes in the forward to the 2002 edition of The Best American Sports Writing. “If you can’t find a better way to say ‘hungrily’ or proudly,’ you need to find a new line of work, preferably nowhere near words.”

Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock disagrees with Reilly. Or he’s not aware of adverbs’ reputations as “crashers in the syntax house party,” in the words of editor Constance Hale. Whitlock loves him some adverbs. They laze about his columns like tired dogs.

Here is an alphabetical list of the “-ly” words to appear in six recent Whitlock columns:

Actually

Arguably

Basically

Collectively

Completely

Equally

Eventually

Exactly

Extremely