A WORD, PLEASE:

Last week’s column was about adverbs. This may come as a surprise to those of you who actually read it. But if you think back, you’ll recall that, after a roughly 580-word rant about a banking error and the shocking decline in communication skills the experience revealed, I still had space for two whole sentences about my intended column topic, adverbs.

Needless to say, this week provides ample opportunity to expand on the subject of adverbs. But there’s also more to report on the banking fiasco that began with a letter informing me that an ATM deposit was being reversed due to “empty envelope.”

Yet, in the interest of grammar, I will try to stick to adverbs.

Like banking customers with simple requests for information, adverbs are greatly misunderstood. Most of us are taught that they usually end in ly and that their job is to modify verbs, adjectives and other adverbs. We believe this as surely as we believe that professional money-handlers know the difference between an endorsed check and thin air.

Yet, reminiscent of a bank that tells you your money is in good hands, we learn that we’ve been somewhat misled. Yes, adverbs modify actions: “I reluctantly called my freelance employer and told her I needed a copy of the cleared check.” But that’s just one of the adverb’s many jobs.

Adverbs answer the questions “When?” “Where?” “How?” and “To what degree?”

For example, “immediately” describes the “when” in the sentence: “I noticed immediately that my bank’s stamp was on the check they told me they had never received.” Another example is the “now” in: “I want my money now.” Here’s an example in which “there” is an adverb answering the question “where?” “We looked in your deposit envelope but didn’t see a check there.”

And here’s a sentence in which the adverb “better” answers the question “how?”: A monkey with an abacus could have handled this transaction better.”

There are also things commonly called “sentence adverbs,” words whose job is to provide commentary on a whole sentence, like the “therefore” in “Therefore, I have proof that the error was yours,” like the “however” in “However, I will keep calling until you give me my money,” and like the “frankly” in “Frankly, I’m shopping around for a new bank.” A lot of people are surprised to learn just how many words fall into the category of adverbs.

Yes, a word can be any of a number of different parts of speech depending on its job in a sentence, just as a mud-eating, 6-year-old can be called a customer service professional if he lands a job with that title. But, as a result, a surprising number of words fall into the category of adverbs: tomorrow, soon, here, outside, inside, there, Tuesday, wherever, afterward, north — the list goes on and on. In fact, it’s often true that, if there’s a word in a sentence whose part of speech you can’t easily identify, it’s probably an adverb.

So, that said, I can dedicate these last few sentences to the conclusion of my banking saga. The customer service supervisor at my bank promised that, once they had in hand a faxed copy of the check bearing their stamp, they would “conduct a research.”

After several failed attempts to get her to translate, I asked what would happen next. She said someone would call me within the week.

When I called my bank’s automated system a few days later, a computer told me that a “miscellaneous deposit” in the amount of the disputed check had been credited to my account. But, offering me one last opportunity to demonstrate adverbs — in this case “ever” and “back” — no one ever called back.

?JUNE CASAGRANDE is a freelance writer and author of “Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies” and “Mortal Syntax: 101 Language Choices That Will Get You Clobbered by the Grammar Snobs — Even If You’re Right.” She may be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.