If you feel sick, do you say, "I feel bad"?
Viz: AP article; "Mrs. Bush said she had it (skin cancer)removed right after the election, adding: 'I was never sick. I never felt badly.' "
Is this another Bushism or am I old-fashioned?
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My mother, a passionat grammarian, has explained to me numerous times that it is actually proper to say "I feel good" rather than "I feel well" (although people think it sounds classy to use 'well') since "I feel good" means "I feel healthy" (good and healthy are both nouns) and "I feel well" means "I can touch things well" (well being an adverb). The negative usage is the same (I feel bad = I feel sick...and I feel badly should mean I don't have a good sense of touch). However, the whole thing is a moot point since English follows usage and people now commonly use well/badly. Even though I know it's not proper grammar, I will often say "I feel well." Or, if I'm around my mother, I can avoid it all together and say "I feel healthy" :)
You can evade the whole issue and use an even more specific and correct usage, "I feel ill," or "I never felt ill." In the above usage, neither "good" nor "healthy" are nouns, but rather adjectives. Thus, the use of the adjective "ill" clarifies the sentence and intended meaning is clear.
I am still a purist and know the diff. between nouns, adjs. and adverbs, but got a little tingle when I read the Laura Bush quote. So why should I be surprised?. Her usage DID make me feel ill, briefly. I had a mini-vision of her groping someone.
Slate.com publishes, periodically, the" Bushism-of-the-Day." Parse those!
Diane Hacker, the author of 'Rules for Writers" highlights the bad vs badly laguage debate and quotes Clifton Fadiman, %u201CDon%u2019t feel bad when you hear the broadcaster say he feels badly. Just remember that all men are created equally%u201D (qtd. in Morris 59). Her website adds insight into many other language debates as well
www.dianahacker.com
ROFL, but why did some of your writing come thru as gobblydegook? (See above %u20I C etc.) Surely Fadiman didn't say that?
I'll leave the unicode encoding to you two geniuses.(Proud to be related on one of you).. And btw, I just showed my sister how to register and navigate. She had forgotten the tags. So I notice that lesliejo is now asking the collective.
The site is working beautifully, even w. a few minor glitches. They seem really unimportant to me...
you say “i dont feel so good”
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