Adverbs

Mr Howard Roark, a Manhattan architect, writes: Dear Grammer Genious, I am the architect charged with writing contract offers for the many subcontractors who will bid for various large jobs involved in the construction of the office towers to be built at Ground Zero in Manhattan. The goal is to make a lot of “moolah” start flowing into corporate coffers as quickly as possible. (By the way, "moolah" is what they keep talking about here. They have completely stopped mentioning any “memorial.” The talk is all about office space and “moolah.”) The big shot corporate types at the contracting meetings have stressed to me several times that when I am writing the contract offers I should “use as many adverbs as possible, for the sake of precision and enforceability.”  The problem is, not only do I have no idea what they mean by that, but I also don’t even know what an adverb is, and I think I should. I remember hearing about them back in, like, the 5th grade or something, but I’m pretty sure there were no adverbs mentioned in any of my classes at the Cornell University School of Architecture, so I guess I must have lost track of the concept somewhere along the line. Could you explain what an adverb is, please? - signed, Howard Roark Dear Mr. Roark, You’re in luck because the answer to your question is so easy. In English, words that end in “-ly” are called “adverbs.” (I believe I read somewhere that the word “ad-verb” comes from the Anglo-Saxon names for the letters “l” and “y”. Or maybe that was just a theory of mine. I'm not sure. Whatever.) Anyways, adverbs are considered highly preferable to other words and should be substituted for them whenever possible. For example, if instead of “Run quick” you say “Run quickly,” you show yourself to be erudite and precise. That’s probably what the big shots at those meetings were getting at. It is possible to compose sentences that consist almost entirely of adverbs, and that’s what you should aim at. Some examples: “Did a friendly burly hillbilly supply the bubbly comely shapely dolly with treacly jelly?” “Does the smelly dastardly barfly imply that the orderly and mannerly assembly was an anomaly? “ “The lowly slovenly bully let fly a crumbly bialy at the sprightly butterfly.” You see? The more adverbs, the better. Now, I have a kind of an architecture question for you. My wife wants to get one of those refrigerators with a freezer drawer on the bottom, but I think a regular one with the freezer on the top will increase the house's resale value more. What is you professional opinion? - The Grammer Genious