Scott Adams

There's the term bad verb.

Bad and adverb.

And that, of course, is where you tend to see journalists, reporters, commentators, politicians, and other public figures will use adverbs to slide falsehoods, white truths, or white lies, rather, half-truths into the popular consciousness using adverbs.

For example, you might have a commentator who would say, President Trump literally just said

followed by something he did not, in fact, literally just say.

It's an attempted convincer, an emotional convincer.

They might say, ICE is basically the Gestapo.

Is it basically?

Is it basically at its most basic level?

Or is it basically Gestapo?

just simply law enforcement, enforcing federal, state, and local law?

Is that what it basically is?

So we want to beware of adverbs used unscrupulously as bad verbs.

So that portmanteau, within that one word I've created, you now have a whole new way of viewing reality.

Just with one word, one word alone.

Scott Adams was fantastic at coining these portmanteaus over the years going back 30 years.

One of the first ones that he did was in the Dilbert Future, 1997.

I have a copy of it sitting right over there.

He described people who got internet access for the first time.

And because they could perform an internet search of the world wide web,