
“Ily” – a word that qualifies–or adverbs–an adverb - firloop
https://htmlgiant.com/random/ily/
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SamBam
The author claim that they're not re-inventing adverbs, but rather want a word
that modifies another adverb (someone in the comments suggests an "adadverb").
But the example doesn't show this:

> “He quickly ate the mango in a distracted manner,” I wanted to write, “He
> distractedily quickly ate the mango,” because, among other reasons, I wanted
> to be more concise.

But in the first sentence, "quickly" and "distracted manner" both modify
"ate," and so they are both simply adverbs.

While there could be some merit in trying to suggest a causal relationship
between the two adverbs ("Because he was distracted, he ate the mango
quickly"), that doesn't seem to be what's being suggested either.

So I can't really see the purpose of this. How does "distracted" _modify_
"quickly" in the example? How is "quickly" itself different, now that it's
been modified? I don't think it is, what's different is the way the mango is
being eaten, so they are both simply adverbs for the same verb.

In any case, adverbs can already modify adverbs:

"He burped enormously loudly."

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TeMPOraL
Yeah, that sentence should look like this: "He distractedily _and_ quickly ate
the mango", and then it's clear both adverbs modify the same verb. Unless the
author was trying to pull the equivalent of "he is distractedily quick", in
which case I don't know what their original sentence would mean anymore.

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SamBam
Ok, but the adverb is "distractedly."

The "ily" in "distractedily" isn't doing anything.

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WorldMaker
And "distractedly quickly" is perfectly cromulent casual English, even if not
something you'd likely want in formal writing.

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Sharlin
Um,

 _> acceleratingily increasing_

Acceleratingly increasing (without the "i") is already grammatical English
with the desired meaning, right?

 _> unconsciousily habitually_

"Unconsciously habitually"

 _> endearingily awkwardly_

"Endearingly awkwardly"

Drop the "i"s and those are all grammatically correct. That's a rather low bar
to clear though!

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aroundtown
Those are just adverbs. Poorly written adverbs.

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thotsBgone
If you remove the 'i' from "ily", then you get the sentence, "He distractedly
quickly ate the mango...," which seems grammatical to me.

In any case, I'm not sure why some high schooler's ill-considered blog post is
Hacker News.

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ChefboyOG
Tao Lin is annoying in his own right, but he's not a high schooler.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Lin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Lin)

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Igelau
The problem is interesting, but the solution is too confusing because an -ily
word looks and sounds too much like an adverb with an epenthesis. In speech
(YMMV because regional accents) I would just think that the person said
"distractedly", changed their mind, and said "quickly" instead.

Makes me wonder if any language existed/exists that does have such syntactic
sugar for "<adverb> <action> in a <adjective> way". Seems like something that
might have come up.

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TeMPOraL
Oh god what is with those em dashes (—) and spacing? Is "foo—bar baz—quux"
correctly spaced? Because it took me a minute to parse the title (and the same
line in the article). For a while I was thinking that "qualifies—or" and
"adverbs—an" are some advanced concepts from linguistic equivalent of algebra.
But it turns out that the sentence is just "qualifies, or adverbs, an adverb".

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thotsBgone
Some style guides let you put spaces on both sides of an em dash, others want
spaces on neither side. No style guide wants spacing on only one side, and the
title is correct with its lack of spacing on the em-dashes.

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saagarjha
I understand the first example-the awkward way that it’s done is endearing-but
the second one seems like a confusing oxymoron. Can someone explain what it’s
trying to say?

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Jtsummers
I was going to say something similar. The best, non-oxymoron, interpretation I
can come up with is:

> A longily concisely written account of skydiving.

Since these are intended as adverbs on adverbs (which, by the way, is already
how adverbs work), my most generous interpretation is:

> A concisely written account of skydiving which took a long time to write (or
> to write concisely?).

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tingletech
this is already a thing though, it sounds like he thinks he invented it?
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ily](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ily)

