Thanks, Dick. That sort of split is a common outcome of historical changes in form and meaning. "Hard" and "hardly" is another pair that have very different meanings.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Veit, Richard
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2006 1:25 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: How not to spell wrong
Thanks, Herb. Interestingly, both "wrong" and "wrongly" are adverbs, but they mean different things. You can be wrongly arrested and you can be arrested wrong.
"The cop arrested me wrongly" would mean I am innocent.
"The cop arrested me wrong" could mean I wasn't read my rights.
Dick Veit
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Stahlke, Herbert F.W.
Sent: Thu 5/25/2006 12:29 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: How not to spell wrong
As Richard points out, "right" and "wrong", like "hard", "fast", and "slow", have the same form whether they are used as adjectives or adverbs. Many adverbs have the -ly suffix, but adverbs don't have to end in -ly (seldom, often, away, there), and not all words ending in -ly are adverbs (friendly, silly). The reason for this lack of clear distinction between adjectives and adverbs as categories (parts of speech) is in large part historical. In Old English, the adverb/adjective distinction was even fuzzier than it is today. The suffix -ly comes from the OE word "lic-" (sounds like "leech"), meaning "body", and early on it occurred as the second element in compound nouns with the meaning "in the manner of". So "soşlice" (read this in HTML) meant "in the manner of truth ("sooth"), truly, true". We get both Modern English -ly and "like" from it, as in "childlike". The resulting compound noun could, with appropriate case endings, be used either as an adjective or as an adverb. However, other words that didn't derive from nouns compounded with "lice" were also used in both ways, and it's from those that we get "right", "wrong", "hard", "fast", and "slow".
The modern pressure some of us feel to say "quickly", "rightly", etc. comes from the process of analogical change, where we sense that since many adjectives used as adverbs have -ly, other adjectives used adverbs should. But notice that not all of them do. No English speaker would say, "He hit the wall hardly", deriving "hardly" from "hard". This particular use of analogy is what's called hypercorrection. Forcing a word to behave according to a common pattern when the word is not typically used in that pattern. After a while, the analogically derived form may settle in as the standard form, and the earlier form, before the analogy took effect, will sound odd. I find this today with an expression like "hone in on", which sounds decidedly odd to me. It first appears in the 1960s. Before that people said "home in on". "Hone" arises in this expression perhaps from its sense of "sharpen", but it's definitely a change from the original expression. However, to many of my students and younger colleagues, "home in on" is the one that sounds odd. I've even had people argue with me that it was incorrect.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Veit, Richard
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2006 11:08 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: How not to spell wrong
"Right" and "wrong" are adverbs as well as adjectives. "Spell wrong" and
"spell right" are both standard English. As Casey Stengal used to say,
"You could look it up."
________________________________
Richard Veit
Department of English
University of North Carolina Wilmington
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of MCJ
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2006 2:57 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: How not to spell wrong
I saw this on another list, from someone berating another poster's
language skills,
"... people are still going to disapprove of you if you spell wrong,
write?"
So I went to Google for a quick check:
"spell wrong" got more than 26,000 hits
"spell incorrectly" got about 9,000 hits
and "spell wrongly" got less than 700 hits.
That's more or less what I'd expect to find. So, what is happening
here? Do you flag "spell wrong", "act wrong", "play wrong" as errors?
Are spell, act, play suddenly nouns? Or, is wrong now an adjective form?
Omar
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