Have you ever had to confront a dirty truth about one of your childhood heroes? I have. I used to worship Woodrow Wilson. My elementary and high school history books treated him like a brainiac whose sole problem was his aloofness. He’d have a great idea, like the League of Nations, or the Fourteen Points, or a less-punitive Treaty of Versailles, but then the lunkheads in Congress — I’m looking at you, Henry Cabot Lodge — would vote him down, seemingly because they were jealous of how smart and great he was.
I graduated from high school and went on to college at Wilson’s alma mater, excited about all the stuff on campus named for him or otherwise honoring him. And then, during my junior year, I started reading about how Wilson was actually a pretty heavy-duty racist, even for his time. (This came from reading Lies My Teacher Told Me, one of the inspirations for this blog.) It was a crushing blow, and revealed to me that, even though I thought I had matured beyond hero worship, hero worship isn’t something you ever really outgrow.
“Weird Al” Yankovic is another of my boyhood heroes. My best friend in elementary school and I listened to Weird Al’s Bad Hair Day album incessantly throughout much of 1996 and 1997. I still get the song “Mr. Popeil” stuck in my head from time to time, and the lyrics to “Amish Paradise” are etched into my brain. Thus it is with a profound sense of sadness and tarnished dreams that I inform you that even Weird Al can be wrong — though not nearly so badly so as Wilson. Weird Al posted a video on Twitter in which he stops a car because he sees a road sign reading
You might be able to predict what happens next: Weird Al gets out of the car, walks over to the sign, and attaches a Post-It with “LY” written on it. Turning to the camera, he says “Grammar, people! C’mon!”
This may have contributed to the appearance of “g-r-a-m-m-a-r” as one of the top trending topics on Twitter. (It appeared with the dashes between the letters on Twitter; I’m not spelling it out or anything.) Twitter discussions of grammar, with or without dashes, are probably something best avoided, so I’m a little dismayed at what Weird Al has wrought. But more than anything else, I am sorry to say that Weird Al is incorrect. There is nothing wrong with the phrase drive slow.
Whoa, there! Perhaps you’re wondering if I’ve gone round the bend. There’s nothing wrong with drive slow? Yes, you read that right. Slow is what’s known as a flat adverb, one that lacks an -ly suffix and therefore looks the same as an adjective. Another flat adverb is right, which I used in the phrase read that right a few sentences ago. But I think my favorite example of a flat adverb is fast, because it’s uncontroversially an adverb, and it has no -ly version:
- (1a) Varla insists on driving fast.
(1b) *Varla insists on driving fastly.(2a) Linda prefers to drive slow.
(2b) Linda prefers to drive slowly.
(The * means the sentence is ungrammatical.) According to the Oxford English Dictionary, adverbial slow appeared around 1500 and has stuck around the language ever since. Adverbial fast and right are even older, dating back to 1205 and 950 respectively, so it’s clear that flat adverbs like slow have a long pedigree.
Not only that, but the pedigree is distinguished as well. Thackeray includes the line “[…] we drove very slow for the last two stages on the road […]” in his 1848 classic Vanity Fair. Even Shakespeare himself would smile upon the road sign; he used adverbial slow in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “[…] but O, methinks, how slow / This old moon wanes!”
And, if you’re the sort who only accepts grammar if some authority tells you it’s the case, you’ll be interested to hear that The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Usage and Abusage, and The Penguin Dictionary of American English Usage and Style all accept adverbial slow in the context of a road sign. (Fowler’s does so begrudgingly, the others openly.)
So, no, idol-of-my-youth and all your re-tweeters, the sign didn’t need corrected. Your ire is misplaced. The same is true for Dr. Pepper’s slogan “drink it slow”. (It is worth noting, though, that adverbial slow can only follow the verb; it usually can’t be an adverb if it precedes the verb. I slow drove down the street, for instance, is wrong.)
Summary: It’s fine to use slow as an adverb; it is part of a class of words that can be either adjectives or adverbs, and has been for 500 years. Shakespeare, Milton, and Thackeray all used adverbial slow, so it’s even fine with the literary set and style manuals
Motivated Grammar 
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August 16, 2009 at 12:03 pm
klinton
so what would you say about texas’ roadsigns that say “Drive Friendly”?
August 17, 2009 at 5:36 am
arnoldzwicky
Slow/slowly on Language Log here and here.
August 18, 2009 at 12:27 am
mike
Apple also caught grief for their “Think Different” campaign.
August 18, 2009 at 7:28 am
Daniel
I have to wonder, however, how serious Mr. Yankovic was being. After all, he is a humorist. I could easily see this being intended as an actual correction, but I could also easily see this being intended as a satire of grammar nazis.
Of course, the comments attached to the video don’t give me much hope: lots of people cheering the action and only a tiny minority arguing that the sign was right in the first place. So even if Yankovic himself knows better, a lot of his fans clearly don’t.
August 20, 2009 at 3:19 am
The Ridger
The -ly suffix makes an adverb out of an adjective, but it makes an adjective out of a noun, thus “friendly” is not and never was an adverb.
The -ly suffix (meaning “like”, by the way, and derived from an Old English word meaning “corpse” – cool, no?) is a late-comer to English derivational suffixes, replacing the now purely phonetic final e (used to mean “adverb”, now means “long preceding vowel”).
Flat adverbs are disappearing. But they aren’t *wrong*.
August 28, 2009 at 9:53 am
Michael Gisinger
So, I’ve been duly corrected. My fear, though – and soundly founded on ample evidence – is that the correct use of “-ly” in adverbs is dying a slowly wrought death. In print and online, I have seen too many instances of adverbs missing the needed “-ly”.
Would you agree? (And yes, I tried to throw in a few extra adverbs. Poorly done, though, isn’t it?)
August 28, 2009 at 11:25 am
mike
@Michael, why “my fear”? Do you mourn the loss of thou/thee as well?
August 28, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Gabe
klinton: I like it — I even picture a grinning Texan in a ludicrously over-sized hat, overalls, and a checkered shirt drawling out “Y’all drive friendly now”. I apologize if that’s an offensive caricature of your people.
arnoldzwicky: Thanks for the links!
Daniel: You may well be right. I didn’t see any satire in it, but I take things at face value too readily.
The Ridger: Wow, “-ly” from “lich” is AWESOME. I have to admit I was skeptical of the etymology — it seemed too good to be true — but the OED backs you up. I am putting this into my bag of comments to make to re-energize a sagging conversation, thanks!
The Ridger/Michael: I like that there are two comments, back-to-back, stating the exact opposite state of affairs. “Flat adverbs are disappearing”; “Flat adverbs are taking over”. Personally, I’m reluctant to agree with either without some corpus evidence. If I were forced to choose, I’d guess that flat adverbs are disappearing more than they’re appearing. But I really don’t know.
September 17, 2009 at 7:45 am
tikimexican
I was scared for a second that you were going to reveal Weird Al was an extreme racist. However once I read on I just realized he was a little bit of a troll. That’s cool, I’m sure it helps him rhyme.
March 20, 2010 at 5:28 am
Tahany
thanks to this explanation, the fllat adverbs were ambigiuous 4 me . now the idea becomes clear
September 3, 2010 at 2:58 pm
GoatBoy
“didn’t need corrected?”
September 3, 2010 at 3:47 pm
John Kilgore
GoatBoy: I think constructions like “didn’t need corrected” are fairly well established in rural usage. My wife (from Wheeling, W. VA) says things like “the barn needs painted” all the time, as do her people. Native to Albuquerque, New Mexico, I found the usage strange at first, and for many years would stolidly insert the “to be” in my own locutions. Over time, though, I grew to like the more elliptical construction (leaving out the “to be”) and now tend to speak that way myself, at least at home.
Here are two other tiny language notes from downstate Illinois, where we reside currently: 1) Folks here say “on accident,” not “by accident.” 2) Locals often say things like, “I counted my change whenever he handed back my groceries” — but mean to describe a single instance, not a repeated one. I have noted this too often not to be sure that there is some consistent logic here, but so far it eludes me. To my somewhat foreign ears, it seems that “when” and “whenever” are being used interchangeably.
Well, I see I’ve gone and changed the subject. But I want to add that this was a good post: useful insight into one of the real battlegrounds of English usage.
October 4, 2010 at 11:16 pm
What is wrong with the “CAUTION DRIVE SLOW” sign? – Dee Kay Dot As Gee
[…] Don’t ask me to explain. I don’t know how. Maybe I should link to someone who can explain the usage of flat adverb better than me. Summary: It’s fine to use slow as an adverb; it is part of a class of words that […]
August 5, 2011 at 5:52 pm
ludovicah
flat adverbs may not be “wrong” but they are certainly ugly
August 5, 2011 at 6:05 pm
mike
@ludovicah — “ugly” is entirely subjective. As with all subjective matters like this, if you don’t like them, you’re certainly welcome not to use them.