[We] Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
[We] Humbly asked….
Humbly is the adverbial form of humble, an adjective. From Latin humilis lowly, insignificant, on the ground, from humus earth, ground: “Not proud, haughty, arrogant, nor assertive; modest, courteously respectful; reflecting, expressing, or offered in a spirit of deference or submission.”
This is the first instance of an adverb, a word modifying the verb of action taken in a Step. Furthermore, the adverb is the first word choice of the sentence.
English grammar allows an adverb to follow a verb as well as precede it, the choice being based usually on clarity or emphasis. The adverb could have come later in the sentence and still have been grammatically correct, although less precise, namely: We asked Him humbly to remove our shortcomings. We would understand from the context that humbly is not modifying to remove, but rules of grammar allow it to do so. As it is given, there can be no doubt: humbly modifies asked, the action taken in this Step.
Until this Step, the simple, active verbs used—admitted, came, and made—were without adornment or amplification. Asked is also an uncomplicated action, but anyone interrogated by law enforcement can attest that asking is not necessarily done humbly. Ask has no such automatically included emotion or manner. Asking can be done in an accusatory way, or even derogatorily: “What’s wrong with you? Are you some kind of idiot?”
Beg, plead, entreat, beseech, pray, are all forms of request infused with humility and supplication (although this use of pray is becoming obsolete). These terms hold not only the sense of a subordinate position, but also at least a slight sense of resistance to the request. Ask is neutral in this regard.
[We] Humbly asked Him….
Here is another example of a Step’s reference beyond itself: the object pronoun Him is a reference to the previous Step’s mention of God. The capitalization is standard English usage when the pronoun refers to Deity, and this is the second such iteration after Step Three. There are two more in Step Eleven.
While there is now a move afoot to bring gender-neutral language to Alcoholics Anonymous, this object pronoun “Him” serves as a reminder of times that predate the quite modern concept of “gender-neutral language” in English. The emergence of this concept regarding English may have been impossible to predict for linguists of generations past: while grammatical gender–inflection and declension–is present in many languages, it is not present in English. Although English is derived from Germanic and heavily influenced by Latin, it does not, like them, utilize masculine, feminine, and neuter gender. From a grammatical standpoint, English is, by default, a “gender-neutral language.”
The idea that a table or tree is masculine or feminine is ludicrous to most monolingual English speakers. These speakers face an insight into their own culture when they become students of an inflected language where every noun has a gender, or every verb is conjugated in different ways depending whether the subject is male or female. Rendering these languages gender-neutral is a far bigger task than in English, where gender is only shown grammatically in its pronouns: he, she, him, her. The remaining gender marking in the language is not intrinsic to its grammar, but largely—though not completely—the result of compound words using “man” or “men” as one of the components: chairman, workmen, alderman, etc.
[We] Humbly asked Him to remove….
Once again, while numerous synonyms could be employed to expand the meaning, the verb “to remove” remains precisely the same as in the Step prior. This has the subtle effect of emphasis, just as the less subtle effect appears with immediate repetition: “Go, go!” “Yes, yes.” “Really, really.”
“To remove,” is clearly, clearly chosen from among all the alternatives.
[We] Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
Steps Five, Six, and Seven seemingly present three different wordings for the same thing: “exact nature of our wrongs,” “these defects of character,” and “our shortcomings.”
Shortcoming enters the lexicon in the late 17th century, about a hundred years after first recorded use of the phrase “to come short,” with the meaning “to be inadequate.” While the word has come to mean a flaw, deficiency, or failure (in character, condition, ability, etc.), its original derivation is still plain to see: to come short of a goal.