What, if anything, is an adverb?

My 7th-and-8th-grade English teacher Mr. Ohler knew his grammar, and approached it logically. I was thinking about that today when I read in Sports Illustrated an interview with former football player Lynn Swann. His mother didn't want him to play football, but when he snuck out and tried out, his mother said "If you make the team, you're not going to quit, even if you decide it was a mistake." Whoa! If you make a mistake, you should accept responsibility for it and all that, but often the rational, even wise, thing to do is to cut your losses by quitting. After all, you only live once, which I meantersay, life is too short to waste it following through on erroneous decisions. (That doesn't seem to be what other people mean when they say "You only live once", but it's what I mean here.)

Mr. Ohler had a thing about proper placement of the word "only". (Also about placement of punctuation marks before or after closing quotation marks, but I think he was on shakier ground there. And about starting sentences with "And". And for that matter, about sentences without verbs.) "You only live once" means that the only thing that you do once is live, which is true in its context, but rather vacuous, like saying "The universe is big." To express the intended meaning, I (and everyone else) should say "You live only once." But YLOO is less catchy and less pronounceable than YOLO.

But I've digressed wildly before there was even a hint of an original point.

I learned, no doubt from Mr. Ohler, that an adverb modifies a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. What about this:

"I don't want to play with or even against him."

Isn't that a case of an adverb ("even") modifying a preposition?

Or this:

"An adverb can modify a verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, or even noun."

Isn't "even" an adverb modifying a noun? "Even" is not an adjective or preposition, and it applies only to "noun", not any of the other nouns.

Mr. Ohler would have had an answer, but I don't know what it is.

Reliving my youth

A couple of weeks ago my longest-known friend Pete and I ran a rally in New Hampshire, to see if we still had what it takes. We didn't.  I got us lost in the odometer check (now that's embarrassing), and we finished last in the "Stock" section. It wouldn't have been sporting to enter the novice section, even if it had been 43 years since our last rally. The high point of the evening wasn't the rally itself, it was the three laps of New Hampshire Motor Speedway after the finish ... a pretty amazing experience. More so for Pete, since he was driving. The capacity of NHMS is 105,000. I'd estimate that the number of racing fans watching us was almost in the low single digits.

Our first rally together was the 1968 Night Navex in Canada. I had no idea what was going on, but we managed to get through the first third of the rally without getting lost or too far ahead or behind on time, even on the roads that hadn't been mowed in six months. After that we managed to find only the 1am lunch stop in Guelph and another rally car that we followed into a random second-half checkpoint. Other than that we were floundering around Aberfoyle and Galt and such, trying to figure out the difference between concessions and sideroads. Hint: concessions are not hot dog stands. They're the roads that farm lots face. It's an Ontario thing.

Today's Comics Curmudgeon post has the title "Trip as a nickname is bad enough, but this is beyond the pale". It might make sense if your parents were into rallying and had their roots in County Dometer.

Speaking of Irish names, Boston Bruins color man Johnny Peirson once noted that Terry O'Reilly and Bobby Orr had one thing in common: their last names both start with 'O'. It's actually even better than that: they have two letters in common -- Terry O'Reilly and Bobby O'Rr.

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