![]() Espy, The Garden of Eloquence: A Rhetorical Bestiary. 'I used to be a pilot,' he explained." (Willard R. 'You can't really train a beagle,' he dogmatized. 'I spent the day sewing and gardening,' she hemmed and hawed. Roy Bongartz developed Croakers, a variant of Tom Swifties in which a verb rather than an adverb provides the pun: (Charles Baxter, "'You're Really Something': Inflection and the Breath of Life." Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life, ed. And we are accompanying these statements with a large inventory of pauses, facial gestures, body movements that can intensify or contradict the apparent meaning of what we're saying." "But most of the time we are saying what we are saying in a manner that isn't obvious. A Tom Swifty is an adverb tag that stupidly points up what is obviously there already. These writerly dialogue adverb tags were called Tom Swifties, in honor of those Tom Swift young-adult books for boys. "Often beginning writers are warned against telling the reader by means of adverbs how a person said something.(Ben Yagoda, When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It. You can find Web sites that list as many as 900 of them." Since then the Tom Swifty has trudged on, not exactly swiftly but with an impressive staying power. 'I only have diamonds, clubs, and spades,' Tom said heartlessly. 'I need a pencil sharpener,' Tom said bluntly. Examples would include: 'I can no longer hear anything,' Tom said deftly. ![]() "In February 1963, a lighthearted time, an anonymous writer at Playboy magazine invented a new type of pun: a fabricated Tom Swift-like line of dialogue in which the adverb modifying said humorously refers to or plays on the subject of the quote."How do I get to the cemetery?" Tom asked gravely."Let's visit the tombs," Tom said cryptically."Where are my crutches?" Tom asked lamely."I never did trust that buzz saw," Tom said offhandedly. ![]()
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