I found, a while back, Paul Brians’ Common Errors in English Usage, which is an awesome list of tons of common errors people make in usage. Every so often I want to look something up and I end up there; it’s listed high on google searches so some of you may have run across it before.

In any case, I was looking over his page on non-errors this evening, and I came across two things that I was interested to find. This particular page is filled with usages that others often cite as wrong, but which Brians says are pretty standard, at least in American English. For example: split infinitives, which aren’t wrong despite so many people disliking them; ending sentences with prepositions; the pronunciation of the word forte. There are two that interested me because they are about things that often bother me when people do them, but I’ve never had someone to point to in the past.

1. The phrase “feeling bad”. To quote this page: ‘”I feel bad” is standard English, as in “This t-shirt smells bad” (not [emphasis mine] “badly”). “I feel badly” is an incorrect hyper-correction by people who think they know better . . . People who are happy can correctly say they feel good, but if they say they feel well, we know they mean to say they’re healthy.’

My reasoning has always been two-fold on this: first off, it sounds weird to say “feel[s] badly.” More logically, however: An adverb (“badly”) modifies a verb; to say “I feel badly” would be to imply that the way you felt was not being done well. As in, “I feel badly” — “I’m not very good at feeling.” Similarly, a shirt can’t smell badly — it can’t smell at all. It might smell bad. It can’t smell grossly, either. Just gross. “Well” is a little more complicated — it can function as an adjective as well as an adverb. This blog post from a few years back highlights the questions — why do people do this? Is it hypercorrection? I think it is. So saying “I feel well” is fine (implying as it does that you’re healthy), but you probably don’t “feel badly.”

2. Healthy vs. healthful. Again, the quote: ‘Logic and tradition are on the side of those who make this distinction, but I’m afraid phrases like “part of a healthy breakfast” have become so widespread that they are rarely perceived as erroneous except by the hyper-correct. On a related though slightly different subject, it is interesting to note that in English adjectives connected to sensations in the perceiver of an object or event are often transferred to the object or event itself. In the 19th century it was not uncommon to refer, for instance, to a “grateful shower of rain,” and we still say “a gloomy landscape,” “a cheerful sight” and “a happy coincidence.”‘

Mostly I just like the examples of emotions being transfered to an event, but I’m also glad to see that he’s of the mind that while technically best to refer to food as healthful and people as healthy, it’s pretty much fine to refer to both as healthy.