Thursday, June 16, 2011

Grammar musings: good, goodly, well

I like walking Connor to school because it gives me time to think on the way home.  These are not always useful thoughts.  Today the How to Talk "All Fancy-Like" Basic Instructions popped into my head and how "I talk well" and "I am good at talking" have essentially the same meaning, but the latter uses the adjectival form of "good" and the former uses the adverbial form, but because it's irregular, it's "well" instead of "goodly", and became fully cognizant for the first time that my 7 year-old who says "I talk goodly" has a better (or sometimes "gooder" in 7y.o. parlance) command of English syntax than the adult who says "I talk good".  But I never hear adults say "goodly", unless they are Pound aficionados, or at least not in this context, so are all the kids who say "goodly" quickly trained by the grammar police to say "well", or do some of them regress to "good"?  Longitudinal study, please!

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