Challenge!
Okay, okay: mere logic can't guarantee that a word is valid, but in this case the ``reasoning trick'' happens to work.
Old name: Presenile dementia.
Other research found that many overweight men deliberately buy shirts that are too tight because they want to emphasize their protuberant bellies.
Rec.Travel offers some links. The CIA Factbook has some basic information on Andorra.
One of the clever turns of phrase in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was returning to the archaic form ``Year of our Lord,'' and naming years as ``Year of our [Henry] Ford.'' (I've seen AF used to represent this dating scheme, though I don't think it occurs in the book. Since it seems reasonable to treat Ford as a gens, the Latin nominative would probably be Fordius, yielding Anno Fordii.) The book begins in 632 AF, or 2540 AD, making 1909 of our era -- the year the Model T was introduced -- year one of the Fordian. The book was published in 1932. Perhaps the 632 date was selected to suggest an uneasy proximity in time. There may be something similar in the other classic dystopian story of the mid-twentieth century, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book was finished in nineteen forty-eight. (It was published in 1949, and Orwell himself was finished in 1950.)
Another expression, more common in Britain, was ``Year of our Grace.''
English is unusual, among European languages, in using a foreign-language expression to designate dates in the current era. It seems that most other languages now use a native expression for A.D. (as well as B.C.).
There is a sketchy introduction to Latin declensions
in the A.M. entry that explains why, if you
tried to find anno and domini in a Latin dictionary, the closest
you'd probably come would be
If you wanted to be pretentious, you could read off ``A.D. 2000'' as ``Anno Domini 2000.' If you did that, however, you'd want to be consistently grammatical and use the plural for ``A.D. 2000-2004'': ``Annis Domini 2000-2004.'' If you have to look it up, you're probably safer saying ``ay dee 2000....''
The words century and decade were once used like dozen -- to refer to a number (100 and 10, like 12) of anything, but eventually the use became restricted to years. Hence, if we were to decline A.D. properly in ``1st century A.D.,'' it would be Annorum Domini -- `[century] of years of the Lord.' Here annorum is annum in the plural genitive form.
![[column]](images/column.gif){kind=small}
Even in Late Roman times, this abbreviation, and mode of reckoning dates,
was not used. The ASGLE serves two kinds of lists of
epigraphic latin abbreviations, which include both common and at-all
reported (in APh 1888-1993) meanings for
AD.
The novel The Second Assistant, by Clare Naylor and Mimi Hare, was published in 2004, and it is subtitled A Tale from the Bottom of the Hollywood Ladder. I decided to acquire the book for insights into the assistant-director pecking order of Hollywood, and to assure an adequately long and discursive AD section of the glossary. It was only after I had invested fifty cents in a previously read exemplar that I realized that the eponymous second assistant -- the heroine Elizabeth Miller -- was not any order of assistant director, but just a gofer at a talent agency. At least it saved me reading the book. (Skimming, however, I notice that at least one ``third assistant'' is mentioned.)
Look -- any doofus can come up with a weak pun involving athletic directors and athletic supporters. I'm just not any doofus, so I'm just not gonna.
This stuff is more amusing to write than to read, I imagine, since if you're not in the mood you don't write it, but you could come upon the entry any time while reading, and the probability that you'll be in the right mood to read it then is zero. (That's not exactly zero. It's just ``more or less'' zero, except that it shouldn't be negative.) An earlier version of this entry advocated an operational definition involving a mirror, but since your own right ear is reflected as the left ear of your image, the wording was problematical.
These puppies usually come in pairs. The other one is a.s.
An alternative possible (well, conceivable anyway) translation of the Latin would be `fortunate ear.'
``The Academy of Dispensing Audiologists®, founded in 1976, provides valuable resources to the private practitioner in audiology and to other audiology professionals who have responsibility for the concerns of quality patient care and business operation.''
A heavily laden sentence like this is a sort of anagram that has to be unpacked: A ``quality patient'' does indeed provide ``valuable resources'' to the ``business operation,'' but you have to be a ``private practitioner'' to really tap into that cash.
Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852) is quite a feminist heroine, so it's not always safe for a person (as opposed to a relatively anonymous glossarist) to point out that there is some serious question as to whether her mathematical competence was all it is now cracked up to be.
The HBAP (Home of the Brave Ada Programmers) WWW Server has a pretty complete set of links. Unfortunately, they're only useful if you want to use Ada or coerce someone else to use it. And here's an Ada Clearinghouse. It boggles the mind. Okay, some minds.
Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes source code for four Ada programs and identifies ALGOL and Simula as similar languages. If you just came here from the ALGOL entry, you shouldn't find that surprising. Now Simula, that almost sounds like a sexy language. Is there a Stimula? No? Why not?
(Also, Tumay Asena serves a Searchable database of archaeological publications.)
Between 1968 and 1999, Pakistan received loans worth $1.75 billion, making it the second-largest beneficiary of the bank's operations. About 55% of the loans came from the ADF. As soon as I find out which is the largest beneficiary of the bank, or whether any of the loans have ever been repaid, I'll be sure to insert that information.
``The view in the United Kingdom is that British Telecom incurs additional costs by its licence obligation to provide universal service. OFTEL, its primary regulator, has accepted this and requires some of its competitors to pay Access Deficit Contributions.''
Hmmm. That makes sense and all, but it's been suggested to me that the word admissions refers to students, somehow.
Actual true fact: the word adder used to be nadder, but people hearing `a nadder' thought they heard `an adder,' and ignorance triumphed. (The Old English word was nædre.)
Changing in the opposite way, newt evolved from ewt, though the alternative eft did not get tagged. The same error occurred with awl (the cobbler's tool), which was often called nawl in the 15th through 17th centuries. For a similar example, see the nonce entry. The word druthers is based on a reananlysis of ``I'd rather,'' but here I think the error is intentional. These are generally instances of mistaken analysis of phrases. When the result is the loss of an initial sound, it is evidently an instance of apheresis.
A somewhat similar process is believed to have played a role in the evolution of our word orange. The fruit and the word both entered Europe from the Arabic-speaking world, and the Arabic name is typically transcribed naranj, close to the Persian (narang) and South Asian names (e.g., Sanskrit naranga). The Spanish (naranja), Medieval Greek (nerántzion), and early Italian (narancia) names all preserve or preserved the initial consonant, as some regional Italian varieties still do (e.g., Venetian naranza).
The English word comes from the Old French (contemporary with Middle English) orenge. The initial en is believed to have been lost in French (and later in Italian) at least somewhat as it was lost from nadder; the repeated en in une norenge (please don't hold me to the spelling) being simplified to une orenge (une orange, in Modern French). An added factor is that in medieval Latin manuscripts, the name of the fruit became associated through its color with the word for gold (aurum). (German has, in addition to a French cognate, the word Apfelsinne -- `apple of Zion.')
Going only slightly further afield, Ancient Greek had a common pun based on the preposition apo, which is contracted to ap' before a vowel: apo nou means `from a mind'; ap' onou means `from an ass.' This is especially compelling spoken or when written, as was once the case, without word spacing. I suppose that if in doubt, you could split the difference and translate this as `out of mind.'
Here's the closing paragraph of an Ole Miss job advertisement of September 2002:
The University of Mississippi is an EEO/AA/Title VI/Title IX/Section 504/ADA/ADEA Employer.
If it weren't for acronyms and law-code numbering, job postings would consist mostly of disclaimer text. See the AA/EOE entry for more on want-ad etiquette.
![[dive flag]](images/dflag.gif){kind=small}
She worryin' about the back rent -- Hah!
She be lucky to get the front rent!
George Thorogood, ``Housewoman Blues''
The nice thing about soft loans is that when you finally admit that they're nonperforming, you only have to write off the principal, and not any expected interest. Always remember: the key to long-term sustainable virtue (particularly charity) is doing it on someone else's nickel.
Anon.: I'm a smash hit. Why, yesterday during the last act, I had everyone glued to their seats! Herford: Wonderful! Wonderful! Clever of you to think of it!
See also prosthetics and URW.
Near the end, if not exactly in the last act, of Rocky Horror Picture Show, Frank-N-Furter immobilizes his prey with a sonic transducer. When Brad Majors says ``It's as if we're glued to the spot!'' the standard audience response is ``My socks! I can't move my socks!''
Greek is inflected, so it is not surprising that word order is looser than in English. Things could get sticky, however. Greek has verbal expressions like to hygiainein, which literally translated would be something like `the to be healthy.' The definite article to is specifically the neuter singular. A reasonable translation of the phrase is `a state of good health' -- note that the distinction between definite and indefinite (indicated by the absence of a definite article) is not as sharp in Greek (or in most languages that have the distinction) as it is in English.
Some languages don't have words that fit our lexical category of adjectives. These languages typically use verbs to express ideas we use adjectives for -- something like ``the man goods'' for ``the man is good.'' The German verb schweigen is like that; it means `to be silent' the same way to roar in English means ``to be roaring.''
- aldermanly
- bimonthly
- birdly
- biweekly
- bodily
- brambly
- brotherly
- bubbly
- burly
- canoodly
- chilly
- clerkly
- comely
- costly
- courtly
- cowardly
- crawly
- crinkly
- crumbly
- cuddly
- curly
- curmudgeonly
- daily
- dangly
- dastardly
- daughterly
- deadly
- disorderly
- doctorly
- early
- easterly
- eely
- elderly
- fatherly
- fortnightly
- friendly
- frilly
- gainly
- gangly
- gentlemanly
- ghastly
- ghostly
- giggly
- gingerly
- girly
- gnarly
- godly
- goggly
- goodly
- googly
- grandfatherly
- grandmotherly
- gravelly
- grisly
- growly
- grumbly
- heavenly
- hilly
- holy
- homely
- hourly
- husbandly
- jangly
- jingly
- jolly
- jumbly
- kindly
- kingly
- knightly
- knobbly
- knubbly
- lawyerly
- leisurely
- likely
- lively
- lonely
- lordly
- lovely
- lowly
- maidenly
- manly
- marbly
- masterly
- matronly
- mealy
- measly
- melancholy
- miserly
- monthly
- motherly
- mumbly
- needly
- neighborly
- nightly
- northeasterly
- northerly
- northwesterly
- nubbly
- oily
- only
- orderly
- pearly
- pebbly
- portly
- prickly
- princely
- puddly
- pugly (this one is slang [< pug ugly], so it's okay if you didn't know it)
- purply
- quarterly
- queenly
- ripply
- rumbly
- scaly
- scholarly
- scraggly
- scrawly
- shambly
- shapely
- sickly
- silly
- sisterly
- slatternly
- slovenly
- sly
- smelly
- snarly
- sniffly
- snively, snivelly
- snuggly
- southeasterly
- southerly
- southwesterly
- sparkly
- spiderly
- spindly
- spinsterly
- sprawly
- spritely
- squally
- squealy
- squiggly
- squirrelly
- stately
- statesmanly
- straggly
- studly
- surly
- swirly
- teacherly
- timely
- tingly
- tinkly
- tinselly
- touchy-feely
- unearthly
- unfriendly
- ungainly
- ungodly
- unholy
- unlikely
- unmanly
- unwomanly
- unruly
- unscholarly
- unsightly
- untimely
- unworldly
- waddly
- weaselly
- weekly
- westerly
- whirly
- wiggly
- wifely
- wily
- wobbly
- womanly
- woolly
- worldly
- wriggly
- wrinkly
- yearly
- yeomanly
- yonderly
Some of these, particularly those having to do with time periods, also function as adverbs. I've omitted nouns that function attributively (i.e., adjectivally), as in assembly hall, fly paper, jelly doughnut, lily pad, etc. I've also omitted many of the possibly nonce forms that arise from the still-productive un- prefix (unmaidenly, unstately, etc.). Some -ly adjectives arise from the application of -y to words ending in l or le, and this is also still productive. The latest such production in the above list is probably canoodly. The -ly ending itself is still producing adjectives. I think birdly is a jocular recent instance.
The quotidian activities normally referred to as ADL's include eating, dressing and bathing. I've had days when I omitted to do one of these. More advanced stuff comes under the IADL heading.
A word game called Mad Libs®, which produced absurd phrases, was popular in ancient times (created by Leonard Stern and Roger Price in 1953, and first available commercially around 1958). This probably contributed to the popularity of the term ``ad lib'' among the unwashed masses and to its use as a noun, and to the general decline of civilization.
You're probably asking: ``like, where else, dude?''
I pronounce ADLS as ``addles.'' You should too.
An article entitled ``3 Giant Feed Companies Agree to Settle Price-Fixing Charges'' in the Wednesday, August 28, 1996 New York Times (C1 -- first page of the business section) describes Archer Daniels as a ``giant grain concern that has long been one of the nation's most influential and politically powerful corporations.'' The article reported that Kyowa Hakko Kogyo of Japan and Sewon America, Inc. would plead guilty, and Ajinmoto Company of Japan no contest in a plea bargain on criminal charges concerning an alleged conspiracy to fix prices in the 600 megabuck market for the food additive lysine, which they produce. In the agreement, one executive from each of the companies pleads guilty to a criminal charge and provides testimony and documents for an investigation whose apparent central target was ADM. I haven't been keeping up with this story, but I was always curious about this sponsor of public broadcasting programs.
In September 1998, three former executives of ADM Co. were convicted of conspiring with Japanese and Korean competitors to fix prices and allocate production for lysine. On July 9, 1999, they were sentenced to prison terms. It was a really weird situation (and I really mean that): the government informant Mark Whitacre had been embezzling millions from the company after alerting Federal investigators to the price-fixing scheme in 1992. He got a nine-year term for that, which he was already serving on July 9. Prosecutors had argued that the two others sentenced, Michael Andreas (son of former chairman Dwayne Andreas) and Terrance Wilson, had masterminded the scheme. Judge Blanche Manning ruled that they had not, but that Whitacre (their subordinate) was a manager of the conspiracy. The lawyers for Andreas and Wilson objected to this unexplained ruling, and the lawyer for Whitacre did not -- all strange since managing the conspiracy increased culpability and, under Federal sentencing guidelines, required Whitacre's sentence to be increased. I'm sure there's something important here that I'm not understanding, and I don't think it's résumé padding.
Last year I got into a conversation with the limo driver on the way to Newark Airport, and I took a guess from accent and appearance that he was Serbian. He said that I was close -- he was from Turkey. So he was Turkish? No, Aramean. My jaw fell off. I knew who the Arameans were, er, are! His turn to drop jaw.
Pigs will fly. (I mean fly economy class.)
One time when I took a limousine from my mother's house to Newark Airport (EWR), the driver asked me to guess where he was from. Looking at his face and not the displayed cabbie ID, I guessed he was from Serbia or thereabouts, and he said I wasn't too far off. He was from Istanbul, and he was an Aramean. He was astounded that I knew what an Aramean was, and I was astounded that there were still people who call themselves Arameans. It was like going fishing and reeling in a coelacanth. The cab companies that serve the New York-area airports really go out of their way to give you a cosmopolitan experience.
Oh -- I see I already told this story at the ADM entry. Anyway, he treated the terms ``Assyrian'' and ``Aramaic'' as equivalent. There's a historical reason for this.
The thing to understand about fonts generally is that text and graphics are treated very differently (by printers and by computers and computer screens). While in principle, there is no difference between the physical method used to produce the image of an alphabetic character or a graphic of the same size, in terms of raw memory there is a great difference: the single black-and-white graphic (no grayscale) takes as much memory as the single character, but a page of text contains many repetitions of the same characters, while every character-size region of graphic requires its own memory-hogging description.
Adobe fonts are different kinds of character descriptions. Adobe fonts (type 1) are described not by bit maps but by parameters for scalable curves that define the boundaries of a character.
Gee, now it's the year 2000 and I'm still reading hard-copy.
Dallas Semiconductor lists some here.
Okay, a little more directly, with the stern warning that the explanation following is written by someone outside the industry (that would be me) who is just trying his best, or maybe his second best. The movie industry has a number of terms for various related kinds of work that it finds important to distinguish. (The pay scales are different; that'd make it important to you too.) Some of this technical terminology refers to ``dialogue,'' which in the industry can mean any utterance of the human voice, even if it is a monologue or a scream. (Sometimes the oddity of including howls in ``dialogue'' seems a bit much, and they refer to ``dialogue and vocalizations.'')
If the dialogue of an individual artist visible on screen is replaced by the same artist, that is called dubbing or post-synchronization. If the visible actor's voice is replaced with someone else's voice, that is revoicing. (Yes, this is also inconsistent with ordinary usage for foreign-language dubbing.) Dialogue can also be a voice-over or commentary out of vision, which may or may not be recorded by a voice actor who appears and is represented as being the speaker. The movie ``What's Up Tiger Lily?'' offers an example of the latter. The studio took it out of Woody Allen's hands when it was 60 minutes long and lengthened it by adding 19 minutes of perfectly irrelevant footage of the ``Lovin' Spoonful'' and added commentary by someone mimicking Woody Allen's voice. (Don't tell me that for that kind of movie, irrelevance is a plus; I said it was ``perfectly'' irrelevant.) In the closing credits, Allen's commentary is also revoiced. Or perhaps the precise lingo would have the movie just recommented there.
Dubbing, post-sync, and revoicing are closely related to the performance of an individual character seen on screen. Voice-overs and commentary are a step removed from this: they are the performances of individual characters, however sketchily identified, who are not on screen. As explained in this pay-scales agreement (see Appendix FI, on p. 48), A.D.R. (Additional Dialogue Replacement or Automatic Dialogue Replacement) is not predominantly concerned with performance in character but has to do with the creation of atmosphere and general characteristic sounds and dialogue to fit with the action, often over crowd scenes.
Besides avoiding those hassles, it has an additional positive advantage. An ADR may represent more than one share of the original stock, and this allows the normal price range of a board lot to be conformed to different exchanges: For example, the usual prices for shares traded on the FTSE are about a tenth of the prices seen on the NYSE, and would run afoul of ``penny stock'' rules on shorting and margin in many brokerages. The ADR's for British Telecom and British Steel each represent 10 real shares.
It seems like things might get trickier if one wanted to go in the other direction: trade in receipts for US shares at prices conventional for FTSE.
In fact, the ADRC (or the CCRA, if you prefer) no longer exists as such. Wait, wait, don't cheer yet. The taxman just discarded some of his less lucrative distractions and changed his name. Now you pay taxes to the ARC (CRA in English).
Founded 1889, a constituent society of the ACLS since 1962. ACLS has an overview.
ADSC's flagship periodical is called Foundation Drilling. My comments on it are based on the issue of June/July 2007. It's a saddle-stitched heavy-paper glossy of approximately 78 inside pages, four-color throughout, with good non-smearing ink and probably quite healthy advertising revenue. One of the regular features is called ``Slide Rules.'' It sure does.
![[Phone icon]](icons/phone.gif){kind=icon}
Archives searchable back to 1992.
``Asymmetric'' refers to the fact that the downstream half of the duplex (from central office (CO) to home) accommodates 6.144 Mbps, while upstream is only 640Kbps. The multiplexing is by OFDM.
In one course, she visited eight different jazz clubs in as many weeks. Enrollment: eight women, zero men. Maybe this is understandable. The other course (there's precedent for calling this sort of thing a ``course'') is like the jazz club thing but with pubs. Night classes focusing on pubs, homework measured in mugs and pitchers -- you'd expect some men might sign up for this sort of education, and you'd be right. Enrollment: sixteen women, two men. One of the men actually showed up. For the second, uh, class meeting, fewer women showed up. I guess they just didn't have a sincere interest in ale.
Single women go in for adult ``education''; single men go in for ``adult'' books. (Book)Mark my words, it'll come to this: adult education courses about adult books. You'll know why. Lesson I: how to tell a romance novel from an adult book by its cover. (Romance novels are swash-font positive.)
The term ``student body'' will never have the same meaning for me again. (Not that it ever did, though.)
Ladies, here's a good kind of course to take to meet guys: driver safety courses. Check out the PTD entry for details. The sex distribution is a bit more representative of the driving population, but getting signed up for this is trickier than for beer or jazz-club education. Still, it may not be necessary for you to get caught speeding; maybe you could arrange to impede the flow of traffic or something. Check out the laws in your state.
Robert says a course in Internet Technology that he took at Stanford had a fairly even gender distribution, but most students were married. A Japanese language course he took in the mid-nineties had a reasonable distribution of singles also. Alright, more good ideas for the lonely cardiac muscle: one of my guard pals at the library, by way of conclusion to his regular rant about incompetent library management, says he's been married to his wife for about a century (I didn't catch the precise figure), ``God bless her. BUT, of the 200 employees in the library, 180 are women, and THAT's the problem.'' I told him that this wasn't going to change anytime soon. Light bulb! One for the guys! There's even a cute one working at circ, and they have a regular turn-over of work-study girls.
Getting back to that liquid culture course, you know, I'm wondering just what kind of ``man'' would let someone else tell him what brew he should drink. Hmm. Well, the first pub I entered the first time I visited England, I said to the barmaid ``I don't know the beers here. What do I want to drink?'' I figured she would recommend whatever people with my accent drink. She chose a Foster's. I liked it, and I'm not even from Oz. (There should be more about the Aussie accent at the Polish entry. More accurate stuff, anyway. But there isn't.)
Update 2002: there's another text-based mate-search tool: personals! In my continuing [throat-clearing noises] sociological research, I have become aware of a paperback tome entitled Playing the Personals, based on research by one Claudia Beakman, assisted by experienced author Karla Dougherty. On page 9 they state
Personals Commandment #1:
Well, heartened by this, let me stride right out of the closet into the foyer and finally get this off my chest: I admit it, I uh, I use the personals. (You probably haven't recognized me from my ads, since there I'm taller, leaner, younger, wealthier, more cultured and yet more down-to-earth, and all-around more impressive, but I'm still that same old modest, honest Al that you've never met.) Hmm. It says here on the back cover that ``Claudia Beakman is a pseudonym for a vice president of a major television company.'' Oh. Thanks, girlfriend.
Anyway, the relevance to this entry (``adult education,'' remember?) comes on page 7. (And maybe further on; I haven't, like, made a thorough review of the text, you know?) The dilemma is posed, and brand-X dating strategies are fairly reviewed and trashed:
Over the years, you've ... spent a fortune taking courses you had no interest in pursuing. You've taken scuba lessons even though you don't know how to swim. You've spent hours in art museums and libraries, and all this culture has been grand, but your feet ache and you're getting tired and you're still alone.
It turns out that the answer is as simple as reading your newspaper, once you've got this volume of expert advice, which you can purchase at finer book discount warehouses anywhere. I got mine off a dollar table at Bargain Books. They have a location near you if you live between Ann Arbor and Chicago. (More about this chain at the OOP entry.)
I probably should have mentioned earlier that there's an emerging, or sharpening, semantic distinction between ``adult education'' and ``continuing education,'' at least in the US. ``Adult education'' is tending to mean remedial education: high-school education for adults who dropped out (possibly before they were adults). Many attend adult education classes in order to earn a GED. Increasingly in contrast, ``continuing education'' refers to college courses taken by adults not matriculated for a degree. (Often they're preparing for a certification, like MOUS.)
FLASH! Here's something that might be useful to single men: According to Suzanne Freeman, in her article ``End of Discussion: Why I'm leaving my book group'' for the Winter 2005 issue of The American Scholar ($6.95 / $9.00 Canada):
In many ways, it's difficult to avoid being a member of a book club these days, especially if you're female. Almost all of my women friends belong to one, and some to more than one. Nobody can say for sure just how many of these groups there are across the country, but the estimated number has quadrupled, from 250,000 ten years ago, to a million or more today. If, by some miracle, you have managed to miss this bandwagon, there are now all kinds of self-styled experts who are ready to help you hop aboard.
Okay, here's another one for the ladies: gyms. No, not those silly places that are mostly about jazzercise or spinning or yoga or Pilates or whatever is popular these days. I don't mean a place with a swimming pool, and you know I don't mean ExerciseUSA, which has different days for men and women. I mean weight rooms. Places with lots of black padding, free weights, and machinery that looks like it sprang from the frothy imagination of an elementary-mechanics textbook author. Oh yeah, maybe some aerobics machines to warm up. The clientele at the blue-collarish workout club I used to go to is great for the girl who likes a man in or out of uniform: lots of cops and national guard reservists. It averaged no less than 85% male any time of day. Of course, that was the problem for me. I mean--the time of day, of course! Now I'm a member of an Anytime Fitness club, with 24-hour card access. (Even there, police officers form a disproportionate fraction of the membership.)
Francesca tells me that when she copy-edits a long work, she goes straight through from the beginning and then goes back and does the first 20% over again. She explains that it takes the first 20% or so to figure things out, so she has to go back and recheck that part. See also the discussion of mission creep under DGE.
Oh yeah:) That was just an aside. The real subject of this entry is adverbs. And adverbials. As is typical in linguistic typology, one word (adverb in this case) names both a syntactic role and the kind of single word that can serve that role. An adverbial is a phrase that plays the role of an adverb; it's short for adverbial phrase. Most adverbials are prepositional phrases.
In English, adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, and larger syntactic units like sentences. The last are sometimes distinguished from the others, and may have different meanings. In most cases, it's not a big deal. Probably the one adverb (or is that two?) whose usage causes the greatest fury is hopefully.
The verb adverb hopefully indicates that the agent performing the action of the verb is hopeful (an adjective). ``He asked hopefully'' means that he asked with hope (probably of a satisfactory answer). Hope implies uncertainty and concern, so this adverb also implies trepidation. The sentence adverb hopefully indicates that the speaker or writer of the sentence is hopeful, rather than the subject of the sentence. ``Hopefully things will go well'' means that the speaker hopes that things will go well. This usage is widespread, and irritation at this usage is also quite widespread, but less so. One objection to the use of hopefully as a sentence adverb is that it's superfluous. It can usually be replaced with an expression like ``it is to be hoped that'' (which may seem overformal) or ``I hope that'' (which may seem overpersonal). Another objection is the ambiguity of expressions like ``Hopefully he told her.''
In Spanish, a large class of adverbs are constructed by applying the suffix -mente to an adjective. French uses -ment in a similar way, but -ment words in English are nouns (see next paragraph). French adverbs in -ment correspond to English adverbs in -ly (e.g.: cordialement, probablement). The preceding statements that contain the word French should be understood to represent my own ignorant guesses. (But sincere ignorant guesses! Or is that sincerely ignorant guesses?)
The -ment ending in English yields a noun from a verb stem. This also comes from French. It goes back to the Latin suffix -mentum, which when added to a verb stem yielded a noun. (Spanish constructs such nouns with -mento or -menta.)
AFAIK, Germanic languages all have cognates of -ly. Dutch and Afrikaans use -lijk and -lik. German has -lich, but the distinction between adverbs and adjectives has largely disappeared. That is, the uninflected form of an adjective is also an adverb, something like fast in English. (Please don't bring up adjectival predicates.) German does have a large class of adverbs (ending in -weise, cognate with English -wise) that do not function as adjectives. For some further discussion of that distinction, see the see through entry.
It's slightly cute that the acronym suggests something as relevant as advertise, but it doesn't do so in Spanish. Aviso is Spanish for `advertisement,' and advertir is `warn.' That's right, amigo, we're talkin' falso amigo. So it was no great loss to Acronymia when ADV became ADE in 1983.
Don't worry about things going right. They never do, and when they do, nobody will mention it. When they mention it, say ``just wait,'' ``we're not out of the woods yet,'' or words to that effect.
Freud theorized that depression is aggression turned inward (or so it is claimed). I theorize that advice is New Year's resolutions turned outward.
The corresponding phrase in Spanish is gracias de antemano (a more literal translation would be `thanks beforehand'). There's no special reason why you should know any of that.
It is more important to know that the head term is a rebus-like
p l a y
--------- ,
word word
and hence repugnant to the discriminating reader. Therefore, its use should
always be accompanied by advapologiesance.
The word advance seems to entice punsters. During the US Civil War, North Carolina's Zebulon Baird Vance was by far the most effective state governor in the Confederacy. Among the less significant things he did was to invest, on behalf of the state, in a blockade-runner that was named the Ad Vance. (You probably want to know how successful it was. It would be funnier if I simply observed the fact of your interest and left it at that, but I'm a bit compulsive, so I'll have to tell you. Fortunately, some of you don't care.) The Ad Vance was launched in July 1862. This is surprising, because Vance was first elected governor of North Carolina on August 6, 1862. Maybe I'll look into that some day. The Ad Vance made 20 successful voyages before being captured by the USS Santiago de Cuba in 1864.
The use of word infix in rebus-like representations of prepositional phrases in in was the theme of the February 3, 2000, NYT crossword puzzle, constructed by Thomas W. Schier. Here are the theme clues and answers (punctuation and capitalization follow constructor conventions):
"1960's sci-fi series" SPLOSTACE "Arrives ahead of schedule" EGETSARLY "Example" POCASEINT "Start, as a chain of events" MOTSETION "Jack Benny's theme song" BLOLOVEOM "Write or call" TOUCKEEPH
``You will, I am sure agree with me that if page 534 finds us only in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.'' This declaration occurs in chapter 1 of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear. Donald Knuth quotes it on page 463 of his The Art of Computing: I. Fundamental Algorithms. The quote occurs at the end of chapter 2 (``Information Structures''), which I suppose is Knuth's paratactic way of noting that it's possible for chapter 2 to be long and chapter 1 short.
Francis Bacon, ``I do not pronounce upon anything.'' This appears at V, 210 of his Collected Works. Nice of him to point that out. (You can imagine my shock when I first read that and mistook the comma for a period: V. 210.)
This State of Florida document expands ADW as ``Aged and Disabled Adult Waiver.'' That seems to imply that it doesn't cover disabled juveniles. I think that's wrong, but fortunately, I don't have to find out.
I don't know if something like ``an ice cube's chance in hell'' or ``an ant's chance at an aardvark convention'' always qualifies. (Of course, the ninth circle of Dante's Inferno burns with cold.)
A figure of speech that's usually more poetical, but which has a similar-sounding name, is asyndeton. The latter word seems to me to be much more common, but googling seems to indicate that it's only somewhat more common.
Such an arrangement is not entirely unknown even in the US. I know a couple of elementary-school teachers who work on the campus of a university in southwestern Michigan. The terminological inconveniences are minor. (``I graduated from Ateneo de Zamboanga University High School.'')