{"id":899,"date":"2011-08-26T08:56:31","date_gmt":"2011-08-26T14:56:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/?p=899"},"modified":"2011-08-26T08:56:31","modified_gmt":"2011-08-26T14:56:31","slug":"the-goodly-the-badly-and-the-uglily","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/the-goodly-the-badly-and-the-uglily\/","title":{"rendered":"The Goodly, The Badly, and the Uglily"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My sister, knowing my appreciation for grammatical authoritarianism, posted the following video on my Facebook page.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Things We Say Wrong\" width=\"1200\" height=\"675\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/UbSSQe6vsSw?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Far be it from me to criticize a fellow Grammar Nazi, but if you\u2019re going to get yourself worked up into a lather about badly grammar, you shouldn\u2019t do such a badly job of it.<\/p>\n<p>His first mistake is to presume that it\u2019s inappropriate to say \u201cI feel bad\u201d because the word \u201cbad\u201d is always synonymous with the word \u201cevil.\u201d If that were the case, I would be an evil tennis player; milk past the expiration date would go evil, and George Lucas would have made three evil Star Wars prequels. (I actually agree with that last one.)<\/p>\n<p>Irregardless*, the guy goes on to state that \u201cI feel badly about that\u201d is the correct way to express badly feelings. As evidenced by my misuse of said term three times in previous sentences, \u201cbadly\u201d is not an adjective.  That little \u201cly\u201d attachment transforms the adjective \u201cbad\u201d into the adverb \u201cbadly.\u201d When you describe yourself as feeling bad about something, you are using the adjective \u201cbad\u201d to describe the subject of the sentence: you. Adjectives modify nouns, not verbs. \u201cBadly\u201d is an adverb, and adverbs do, in fact, modify verbs. So \u201cbadly\u201d does not describe you; it describes your feeling capacity. If you feel badly, then there is something wrong with your sensory inputs.<\/p>\n<p>If you doubt this, notice that you may feel hot, but not hotly; sad, but not sadly, and pregnant, not but pregnantly. And who can forget that classic James Brown hit, \u201cI Feel Goodly?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of goodly\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Most members of my church can cite verbatim the first part of the first sentence in the Book of Mormon. It goes something like this:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This has been the subject of countless sermons about how goodly it is to have goodly parents. It is virtually canonized in songs our young\u2019uns sing every Sunday.<\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cWe have been born, as Nephi of old, to goodly parents who love the Lord\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Mormons have all bought the idea that \u201cgoodly,\u201d therefore, is synonymous with \u201cgood.\u201d (To confuse the point I made earlier, \u201cgoodly\u201d is, in fact, an adjective here, despite the \u201cly\u201d attachment. It\u2019s an ugly truth that not all words with \u201cly\u201d are adverbs. Witness the adjective \u201cugly,\u201d for instance.  I wish the English language functioned more consistently and less uglily, because that would be goodlier than what we have now.)<\/p>\n<p>With that said, if \u201cgoodly\u201d means \u201cgood,\u201d then why not use the word \u201cgood?\u201d Nephi, the guy who calls his parents \u201cgoodly\u201d says it was a \u201cgood thing\u201d that the children of Israel were brought out of bondage. (1 Nephi 17:25) After he built his ship, he tells us that \u201cmy brethren beheld that it was good.\u201d According to LDS.org, the word \u201cGood\u201d appears 205 times in the Book of Mormon, and it always means what you think it would mean.  The word \u201cgoodly,\u201d however, never appears in the Book of Mormon again after that first verse.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, you could argue that Nephi never used the words \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cgoodly,\u201d because the Book of Mormon is a translated document. But if you did that, you\u2019d be playing right into my evilly hands, because \u201cgoodly\u201d would therefore be reflective of the translator\u2019s vocabulary, not the author\u2019s. And what did the word \u201cgoodly\u201d mean to Joseph Smith in 19th Century America?<\/p>\n<p>The clue is in the next word after the clause in question.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents, <em>therefore\u2026<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Aha! The word \u201ctherefore\u201d establishes causality. The goodliness of Nephi\u2019s parents led to some result, which is revealed in the subsequent clause.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents, therefore <em>I was taught somewhat in all the learning of my father;<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Nephi\u2019s parents\u2019 goodliness allowed for Nephi to receive a stellar education. How does one receive a stellar education? One pays through the nose for it using one\u2019s goods. \u201cGoodly,\u201d in the 19th Century, meant \u201claden with goods,\u201d or \u201cwealthy.\u201d But that screws everything up.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe have been born, as Nephi of old, to wealthy parents who love the Lord\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m sorry, but it just doesn\u2019t have the same ringly to it.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>*\u201dIRREGARDLESS\u201d IS NOT A WORD, YOU DINGUS!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mysister, knowing my appreciation for grammatical authoritarianism, posted the following video on my Facebook page.http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=UbSSQe6vsSwFar be it from me to criticize a fellow Grammar Nazi, but if you\u2019re going to get yourself worked up into a lather about badly grammar, you shouldn\u2019t do such a badly job of it.His first mistake is to presume that  ... <a title=\"The Goodly, The Badly, and the Uglily\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/the-goodly-the-badly-and-the-uglily\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about The Goodly, The Badly, and the Uglily\">Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}