> A comment from Britain on the disappearance of '-ly'. This is now the normal rule in Britain for common non-standard English speakers : e.g. 'We can leave the car park quicker this way' [not 'more quickly'] 'She ran too close to the next runner' [not 'closely'] 'The only way to avoid getting fat is to eat moderate.' 'Beckham passed the ball real neat to Rooney' [not 'really neatly']. This was heard on the BBC radio 'Today' Programme, which has a huge audience. It is de rigueur for BBC football commentators, both on radio and TV, to speak with a passable vernacular accent, vocabulary and grammar -- though not cricket commentators! 'The police drove slow down the avenue' [not 'slowly'] 'The bus passes here frequent' [not 'frequently' -- adverb of time] Even 'good' is heard instead of 'well' in the abverb slot: 'You did good in that last throw'. Adverbs of number that are ordinals ('first', 'second', 'third', etc.) are very rarely heard or written here with the suffix '-ly' even by speakers of standard English: e.g. 'Second, you've to remove the washer' is what would be said, and not 'Secondly, you've to remove the washer'. It is no surprise that 'ly' is disappearing since very few children in British schools receive any thorough training in grammar as a result of the neo-romantic reaction against it in the sixties, which led to its removal from all examination syllabuses for secondary pupils. It lasted so long that few teachers have any really secure knowledge of grammar. So not many pupils in English schools could tell you why an adverb is required in the sentences above. The underlying motive of this distaste for grammar was the suspicion that it acted as a filter against working-class pupils, whereas it was actually an aid to them. The result has been to exacerbate the already strong class-difference in speech that is particularly typical of England (rather than Scotland, Wales and Ireland). The absence of '-ly' can be taken as one of the unconscious, anti-authority, peer-group bonding signals among state-school adolescents today, comparable to the glottal stop (saying, instead of 'better', 'be'er' -- the 't' having vanished). Some of my pupils used to protest that that they could not say 't'. I used to ask them to say the numbers from thirteen upwards: the glottal stop would be there for 'thirteen' ('thir'een') and fourteen ('four'een'), but the 't' suddenly reappeared in 'fifteen', since 'fif'een' sounds very peculiar! To judge from the history of language, the normal rule for the majority usually wins out, so perhaps '-ly' will disappear. Edmond Wright Dr. Edmond Wright 3 Boathouse Court Trafalgar Road Cambridge CB4 1DU England Email: [log in to unmask] Website: http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~elw33 Phone [00 44] (0)1223 350256 To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/