“I Feel Bad” Is Correct. “I Feel Badly” Usually Is Not.
The people correcting this one have it backwards, and the reason why explains a whole category of verbs.
Author
Nathan Cole writes the adjective guides and word lists on Grammar Simplified. Every guide he publishes is checked against Merriam-Webster for spelling and usage, the Chicago Manual of Style for punctuation, and the AP Stylebook where a convention is specific to web writing. Where a rule is genuinely disputed among those authorities, he says so in the guide rather than picking a side quietly. Corrections are welcome and get acted on — see the editorial policy.
964 guides published
The people correcting this one have it backwards, and the reason why explains a whole category of verbs.
One ending describes how you feel. The other describes what caused it. Confusing them produces sentences that are grammatical and accidentally insulting.
A small-business owner and a small business owner are different people. The hyphen is not decoration; it tells the reader which words go together.
A few adjectives describe absolutes. Modify them and half your readers will wince, for a reason they can rarely explain.
One comma, two respectable style guides, and decades of people insisting the other side is illiterate. Here is what is actually at stake.
The rule against it was invented in the nineteenth century by people who thought English should behave like Latin. It never did, and it never has.
Synonyms are not equivalents. The word that means the same thing can still be the wrong word, and a thesaurus will never tell you which.
Every native speaker says “a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife” in exactly that order, and almost none of them could tell you why.
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