An Adverb That Defies Certainty I am an "almost" writer. A quick and random sweep through a few of my manuscripts reveals the following uses of "almost": almost never, almost always, almost certainly, almost ready, almost willing, almost impulsively, almost as though, almost immediately, almost everywhere, almost kind, almost cruel, almost exciting, almost home, almost asleep, almost dead. She said "Don't" almost before his lips had touched hers. We know what "almost" means. Dictionaries, however vaguely they define the word, agree on this, that "almost" means something between "short of" and "sort of." We also know that "almost" is mostly used as an adverb, and adverbs can define a verb, adjective or another adverb. But "almost" is also a stringer, a filler. Two extra syllables, like blush after makeup, just that requisite fuzziness, like ambiguity in an instance of total candor. A halt in midspeech, an extra tap on the piano's pedal, a suggestion of doubt and degree, of resonance and approximation, where straight, flat surfaces are the norm. "By using 'almost,' says the writer, "I'm saying there is 'less than'; but what I mean to suggest is that there is possibly 'more than.' " "We were almost naked" says we weren't quite without clothes, but couldn't wait to be, which might easily mean "we couldn't believe we were almost naked." "Almost naked" is more charged, more erotic, more prurient than "totally naked." "Almost" is all about gradations and nuance and about suggestion and shades. Not quite a red wine, but not crimson, not purple either, or maroon; come to think of it, "almost" Bordeaux. "Almost" can be a polite way of saying something definitely. It withholds the obvious and dangles it just long enough. "Almost" is about uncertainty soon to be dismissed but not quite dispelled. "Almost" is about revelation to come but not entirely promised. "Almost" mollifies certainty. In butcher's language, it tenderizes certainty. It is anti-certainty, anti-conviction and, by definition therefore, anti-omniscience. Authors use "almost" to avoid stating an outright fact, as though there were something inauthentic, dishonest, unfinished, undecided or even unwholesome - some might say repulsive, tacky, snub-nosed, too direct - in qualifying anything as definitely a this or a that. "Almost" reminds the fiction writer that he is just that: writing fictions, not journalism. How can he know for certain whether X was really in love with Y? One could almost guess that he was. But who is to know? That night, X caught himself almost thinking of Y without her clothes on. Did he actually think of her naked, or is the writer trying to make the reader consider something that was never thought of at all? "Almost" speaks a writer's impatience with here-and-now, hard-and-fast facts. "Almost" teases. It is not a "yes" or a "no"; it is almost always a maybe. "Almost" withholds definitive knowledge of things, and it invokes the provisional nature of everything found in a narrative, including, of course, the narrator's own knowledge of the facts he's been narrating. A cautious narrator uses "almost" almost as a way of vouchsafing his honest attempt to capture a particular essence on paper. "Almost" guarantees him an out. "Almost" not only allows an author to suggest that he might at any moment withdraw or revoke anything he's put on paper, but "almost" is also an elusive loophole that wants to be noticed, the fine print we know was always there and should have caught the first time. Almost is bad conscience trying to pass for good conscience by fessing up and displaying its wiles. "Almost" is not the favorite word of all authors. One can imagine - though no one's counting - that Hemingway was not a friend of "almost." Nor was Teddy Roosevelt. Nor, I'd wager, would the frugal, unimaginative Messieurs Strunk and White have been well disposed to it had they been asked about its eloquence. But then there are writers who with an "almost," or a "presque" in French, can suddenly illuminate a reader's universe. She asked herself why she had done something so perilous, and she concluded that she had embarked on it almost without thinking. The word means everything, or it means nothing at all. But an analyst looking to beef up his income could feed his family for a month with that one sentence translated from "La Princesse de Clèves." André Aciman is the author, most recently, of "Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere." He teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center and is the director of the Writers' Institute. This article appeared in print on Sept.