791-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Wrong and wrongly Carolyn Dane commented, “I agree entirely with your use of wrong. Another instance of the same issue is people who feel badly about something. As Isaac Asimov said, ‘The only people who feel badly are inept dirty old men.’”

Marc Picard introduced me to a new grammatical term. “Adverbs like wrong, sure, fast, slow, etc. actually have a name, as I discovered recently when one of my students did a paper on this phenomenon in a course I was giving on the history of English. They’re called flat adverbs, presumably on the basis of phrases like ‘to fall flat’ or ‘to turn down flat’.” The Oxford English Dictionary includes flat adverb as first being used by the philologist John Earle in his work The Philology of the English Tongue of 1871, though it doesn’t explain why he chose it.

A perspective on all such intricacies of English was supplied by Vivien Allen: “As a teacher of English as a foreign language before I retired I always read your weekly magazine with great interest. Today I was reminded of a class at a language school in Cambridge where I taught at one time. I had been taking my students through the various pronunciations of -ough and had put a list of words such as bough, tough and through on the blackboard. At the end a German boy sighed deeply and said, ‘Mrs Allen, You don’t know how lucky you are being born speaking English’! On another occasion I congratulated a Dutch student on his excellent English and commented that the Dutch students always arrived well grounded in the language. He replied, ‘If you are born speaking a language that sounds like swearing in hiccups you have to be good at English’!”

On the edge Several readers provided a further illustration of the worrisome difficulties of English. They noted that in this section last time I wrote, “Two comments suggest that I sounded the death knell on Great Wen too precipitately”. They firmly told me that the word should have been precipitously. Having written one long piece last week to justify my choice of adverb, I’m disinclined to impose another on long-suffering subscribers: the complicated story of the ways in which the two words have interacted in meaning and usage would need a substantial and probably boring article. However, I’m surprised at the comments, since all the dictionaries that I’ve consulted give as their first sense of precipitate phrases such as “sudden, hasty, rash” or “done without careful consideration”, They also give one sense of precipitous as “hasty or precipitate”. Jeff Kabacinski lightened his gentle criticism by ending his message, “though it does bring to mind that old chemistry joke, ‘If you’re not a part of the solution, you’re a part of the precipitate’.”