Simply Unnecessary

"Simply" is a word that makes me cringe.

It's not the word "simple" I dislike; that's a lovely adjective. But something about that adverbial "ly" suffix, combined with the way the word is used, bothers me.

Unlike many of the other words I hate, which often earned my contempt decades ago, my dislike of "simply" started only about five years ago. I was laying out recipes for a client when I felt what is now a familiar surge of bile. I don't remember the exact words she had written, but they were pretty similar to this:

When the water boils, simply turn off the stove.

The urge to remove that extraneous adverb was almost overwhelming.

Soon I noticed that "simply" usually appears in instructional contexts like this, where it adds nothing more than an air of condescension.

What function does it serve? Is it trying to indicate that you don't need to do this step carefully, that there's no way you could do it wrong? Is that helpful?

It's not just recipes that suffer from "simply." Instructions for how to do just about everything are littered with them, many describing activities that are not simple at all:







Some uses were extra-clueless:


Oh, simply follow the directions. Thanks. I hadn't thought of that.


Sounds simple.


Oh yes, replacing my recursive resolvers is always simple.


If you have to write instructions on how to use window blinds, it isn't simple.


Whaaa?


As everyone knows, e-commerce is something users have no trouble with, because it's so simple.


Ouch!

While looking for examples, I also discovered there are a large number of writers on the interweb who don't know the difference between "simple" and "simply":

I can think of a few cases where the word doesn't bother me much, if at all. If you search "simply" on my blog, you'll find it used mostly in quotes from other sources, but a few times I've used it in a way that seems to work:

Much as I liked the editorial, I thought Steve Sack's cartoon from a few weeks ago probably made the case against the bill more simply and effectively....

or

Daniel Shaw, a speech language pathologist from Minneapolis, wrote simply of the divergence between "my" children -- who have been nurtured and prepared for school...

or

Too often, a concisely written essay is graded lower simply because it's short.

The last of those examples comes the closest to using the word in the way I don't like, and I might have been better off using "only" or "merely" (although I don't like "merely" much either).

It's simple. It's important to be careful using "simply."