| 词组 | feel bad, feel badly |
| 释义 | feel bad, feel badly It is a standard joke of usage writers to remark that someone who says "I feel badly" must be complaining about a defective sense of touch, or thick gloves, or numb fingers. The Joe Miller who invented this hoary witticism may have been Frank Vizetelly, whose 1906 A Desk-Book of Errors in English has this: "However, feel badly is correct when the intention is to say that one's power of touch is defective...." Subsequently joining the merry band of misunder-standers we find Bierce 1909, Evans 1961, Harper 1975, 1985, Freeman 1983, Kilpatrick 1984, and others. Of course, they know and we know that people who say "I feel badly" simply mean they feel bad. How do we explain the persistence of feel badly? One of the more frequently mentioned causes involves hypercorrection, often labeled with such words as gentility, overrefinement, or elegance—that is, the use of an incorrect form in one place in reaction to being corrected upon using the replaced form in some other construction. If hypercorrection is one of the influences on feel badly, its historical roots would go back to the campaign against flat adverbs—that is adverbs like bad, right, slow, sure that have the same form as adjectives— that was begun in the second half of the 18th century. (See flat adverbs.) The explanation would be, then, that correction of bad in hurt bad, or need it bad would result in badly after feel too. Bernstein 1965, however, thinks this explanation will not bear close inspection. He points out that other adjectives after feel are seldom if ever corrected to adverbs: no one seems to use "I feel sadly" or "I feel angrily," for instance. If hypercorrection is not a persuasive explanation, we must look elsewhere. We can find several other influences, but probably no single comprehensive explanation. First, feel plus an adverb is not a nonstandard construction; feel is often followed by adverbs when they qualify the degree or way of feeling. Thus one may feel strongly about an issue, or feel differently about it now. Bernstein 1965, 1977 points out that it is possible for badly to be used in such a construction; he posits "I feel badly the need for more discussion of this issue." Second, the feel bad, feel badly choice is related to the feel good, feel well choice, where many people choose one or the other depending on whether they are talking about a physical or mental state (see good 1). Those who differentiate use feel well for health and feel good for emotion; many make the same distinction with bad and badly, choosing feel bad for health and feel badly for emotion. Here, for instance, is Harper panelist David Schoenbrun: • "I use 'I feel bad' to express a physical condition, but 'I feel badly' to express an emotional response." The following examples are other evidence for badly used of emotion: • ... I know you must have felt very badly when you cleaned out Mamma's closet —Harry S. Truman, letter, 21 Oct. 1947 • We feel very badly about your only having one turkey, worth a paltry half grand —James Thurber, letter, Fall 1938 • ... I was laughing, but trying not to for some reason, feeling badly that I laughed, feeling ashamed —E. L. Doctorow, Loon Lake, 1979 • The other waiters began to feel badly. 'Aw, lay off,' Bernie Altman said —Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, 1959 • Don't feel badly if you didn't do too well on this little test —advertising letter, March 1980 Bryant 1962 cites Ernest Hemingway and Walter Lippmann as also using badly for the emotional state. The choice of an adverb for the emotional state instead of the related adjective is also attested with other adverbs: • ... it [a letter] had effect enough over me to make me feel unpleasantly for two days —Henry Adams, letter, 9 Feb. 1859 But Bryant and others point out that the evidence of surveys shows that many people do not differentiate, and use badly for health as well as bad for the emotional state: • I do not feel so badly this forenoon—but I have bad nights —Walt Whitman, letter, 17 June 1864 • At once he felt bad, for he usually charged two twenty-five for this kind of job —Bernard Malamud, The Magic Barrel, 1958 • Still, I feel bad about not having written you —E. B. White, letter, 23 June 1946 In fact Bryant sums up several surveys by saying they show usage to be almost evenly divided between feel bad and feel badly, regardless of whether health or emotional state is the topic. Our printed evidence, however, shows feel badly being used most often for the emotional state. Third, Evans 1961 notes that some people may choose badly because they think "bad could only mean wicked." This is not an idle supposition. An American handbook, Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech, published in 1869, explicitly prescribes the usage now decried as erroneous: • "He feels very bad, " is sometimes said as descriptive of one's feeling very sick. To feel bad is to feel conscious of depravity; to feel badly is to feel sick. It is not unlikely that the association of bad with moral turpitude has survived in many American families and has given further strength to the use of badly. Fourth, we cannot entirely dismiss the influence of well, preached as an adverb in innumerable schoolbooks yet entirely acceptable after feel—so much so that it has been recognized as an adjective in this function by most dictionaries. As long ago as 1927, Josephine Turck Baker (The Correct Word: How to Use It) mentioned that some authorities (but not a majority) proposed recognition of badly as an adjective. It has been so recognized in some unabridged dictionaries—in Webster's Second and Webster's Third, for instance. The attitudes of the usage books to feel badly is interesting. Almost all of the school handbooks, from grade-school to college level, prescribe feel bad; it is clearly the pedagogical standard. But Copperud 1980 sums up his survey of dictionaries and the more general usage books with this observation: "The consensus is that feel bad and feel badly are standard and interchangeable with respect to both emotional state and physical condition." Conclusion: the controversy over feel bad and feel badly has been going on for more than a century, and since its beginnings lie in two opposing prescriptive standards—that of the 1869 handbook prescribing feel badly and that of the 20th-century schoolbooks prescribing feel bad— it is unlikely to die out very soon. People will go on about as they do now—some differentiating bad and badly, some not, some avoiding badly, some not. You can see that the question is not as simple as it is often claimed to be, and, with those considerations in mind, make your own choice. Whatever it is, you will have some worthy comrades and some worthy opponents. |
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