Word Games: Tom Swifties

"I Love Being an AC Producer," Tom Said Contentedly

The Tom Swifty is a form of wordplay that pokes fun at the excessive use of adverbial dialog attribution.

Huh?

OK. First things first:

Say we encounter the following line in a work of a fiction:

"Leave me alone," she pleaded.

The phrase " she pleaded" is dialog attribution. It attributes the sentence "leave me alone" to a female speaker ("she") and also attributes a manner of rendition to that sentence. In this case, we know that "she" spoke pleadingly (and not angrily or menacingly or playfully).

So far so good.

All too often, however, writers will not leave well alone. They just have to go and add an adverb (an -ly word) to further modify the verb of dialog attribution. For the above example, this would give us something like:

"Leave me alone," she pleaded despairingly/tearfully/abjectly and so on and so forth.

While this sentence structure is formulaic, it was not before the early 1960s that it gave rise to a particular form of word play, the Tom Swifties.

Tom Swifties derive their name from Tom Swift, the courageous and inventive hero of a series of juvenile adventure novels that first appeared in 1910. The series main writer and editor, Edward Stratemeyer, would not let Tom make the simplest statement without adding a qualifying adverb to it. Tom Swift never simply "said". Tom Swift would say something modestly or bravely or eagerly or... swiftly.

A Tom Swifty is a word game, a pun, a parody of adverbial redundancies, i.e. of the writing style that dictates that a verb of dialog attribution should always be followed by a qualifying adverb. The trick is to choose an adverb that summarizes the main statement and, in doing so, results in a funny (let's hope) pun. For example:

"I love pancakes," Tom said flippantly.
"Who has stolen all the apples?" Tom said fruitlessly.
"Try that direction," Tom said pointedly.
"Go to the back of the ship," Tom said sternly.
"I have a gift for you," Tom said presently.

These four sentences exemplify the traditional adverbial Swifty: statement + Tom said + qualifying adverb