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Comment by eadmund | Hacker News Reader

This is off-topic, but I really wonder what happened to adverbs in English, and why. When I was a boy — not that long ago — it would have been 'blazingly fast.'

The project itself looks pretty cool, though. It's neat to see WebAssembly starting to take off. I'm eager to begin programming browser applications in a decent language …

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American English abandoned them. They are still used in British English.

And the internet has made English American, newer generation in EU are now writing more American English than ever.

What happened is that they became progressively less common in informal/spoken American English, and then only very recently in a fairly sudden transition most commercial writing abruptly lost the attention to grammar, spelling, word choice, etc., that had been previously the norm for formal writing because who has time for that?

It's common to avoid adverbs in general when writing fiction IIRC.

Not by removing the ly though, but by choosing a more expressive verb.

I was taught in (american) school adverbs are a lazy and informal form of expression. While I didn't agree at the time, I use them now only vanishingly rarely. ;)

> I was taught in (american) school adverbs are a lazy and informal form of expression.

I've certainly (in the same place) heard that heavy adverb use is a “writing smell” in much that way, but the point of that was very much not to substitute the use of adjectives serving as if they were adverbs for actual adverbs.

True. "blazing-fast" sounds almost like a pidgin variant to me.

Off-topic, but I love Stephen King's comments [1] regarding adverbs.

[1] https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/03/13/stephen-king-on-adv...

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