"When": The Most Unstable Adverb?

'When': the unstable adverb

The "adverbs" discussed in the "novel" written by author Daniel Handler, shown in the graphic to the left, deal with aspects of what the author calls "falling in love."

Those novel adverbs describe how people experience seventeen various aspects of falling in love: "Immediately," "Obviously," "Arguably," "Particularly," "Briefly," "Soundly," "Frigidly," "Collectively," "Symbolically," "Clearly," "Naturally," "Wrongly," "Truly," "Not Particularly," "Often," "Barely," and "Judgmentally."

Of course this shows how very diverse the "simple" notion of romantic love, lust, sexual desire, or whatever one calls it, can be.

Likewise, the seemingly simple adverb "when" is being used in today's post for a similar exercise which will show that particular adverb's ability to incite, inspire, and elicit just as much passion as those other adverbs associated with "the romance" depicted in the novel.

"Are we there yet?" is often used to show some of the anticipation which erodes patience in a context of "when" something hoped for is going to happen.

That aspect of "when" is totally different if what we are anticipating is a serious threat:

"The First Law of 'When': the more critical an issue is to the future of our civilization, the difficulty of determining when that critical issue will take effect tends to increase exponentially.

The Second Law of 'When': the greater the amount of time it takes for that critical issue to play out completely tends to exponentially diminish civilization's grasp of that critical issue.

The Third Law of 'When': the more destructive the impact which that critical issue will have on civilization tends to exponentially increase the time when that critical event will be understood to have begun to take place."

(Dredd Blog Quotes). I think I can illustrate that with the following additional quote:

Our present extreme fossil fuel driven carbon dioxide global warming is predicted to produce exactly the same methane release from the subsea Arctic methane hydrates and deep mantle methane from the Enrico Pv Anomaly Extreme Methane Emission Zone by the 2050's, leading to total deglaciation and the extinction of all life on Earth.

(Mantle Methane, Arctic News, emphasis added).  That quote is from a recent assertion, however, the idea behind the assertion is a couple of years old.

That distressing assertion brings up "when is this supposed to happen?", and is in opposition to the "when" conceived by most of our climate scientists (Ecologist, A Student Writes ... Global Extinction Within One Lifetime?).

The danger is oh so real and stable, even though the "when" is more unstable (NASA).

These various and conflicting "whens" illustrate "the laws of when" cited to above.

That is because, for one thing, we don't want our extinction to happen any time soon do we?

Is there, then, a valid love of species, love of humanity, and/or love of civilization that is strong enough to cause the greatest "when" of all time?

Is there a love of civilization that inspires us to know that the greatest "when" of all time is right now?

Which is the time when we get serious as a heart attack about the terrorism of Oil-Qaeda!

Or, is our greatest love only like the 17 adverbs used to describe various types of romantic love depicted in the novel?

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"When" (1 of 18 adverbs)  - by The Kalin Twins

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