I need your help and advice, fellow stickers.
Please advise me on the best technique to employ as I attempt to refrain from violence when confronted by the most annoying pet peeve.
There could be some bad hurt coming if I ever again hear anyone say they "feel badly" about something.
You sticklers and I all know you can't feel badly unless you're touching something and doing a lousy job of it. Like a doctor, say, who is not good at palpating. That doctor would feel badly.
But if you're upset or expressing pity, you feel bad. You don't feel gladly or sadly or madly, why would you feel badly?
I can see how the mixup happens. It's an adverb versus adjective thing and when added to the verb feel, it can certainly get tricky. For me, though, it's the screaming that's going to be troublesome; screaming that's either mine or that of the next person near me who gets it wrong.
Thank you for your kind advice on this matter,
M
You could decide to feel bad that those folks didn't pay attention in English class. However, you have just created the answer to your own question. Now you can just refer them to your blog. What do you do when someone says gotten?
ReplyDeleteFunny enough, I've never taken issue with gotten. I will now, of course!
ReplyDeletePerhaps there's something about the "en"; when I was a kid, we had two categories of cookie in my house: cookies and "boughten" cookies, which I am assured by dictionary.com is in use to describe store-bought food, but which is not considered standard usage. No kidden!