#trumpiswrong

Badly

This isn’t an Americanism as much as a grammatical error made more by Americans than Brits.

Me. Ow.

Here's the dilemma: is it, 'I feel badly about it,' or, 'I feel bad about it'? Ask Cyndi Lauper, and you'll get the correct answer. Ask Donald Trump, who famously 'corrected', or uncorrected, poor Cyndi on Celebrity Apprentice, and you'll get the wrong answer.

Here’s the problem. The verb ‘to feel’ can be a linking verb or an action verb. Linking verbs, like ‘to be’ are described using adjectives, and action verbs, such as ‘to write’ (you wouldn't, would you?) are described using adverbs.

Now, ‘bad’ is an adjective and ‘badly’ is an adverb.

The fact that ‘to feel’ has dual roles is confusing and leads to errors.

‘I feel bad’ describes emotions. In this case, ‘feel’ is used as a linking verb. To check, you can replace ‘feel’ with ‘am’ (from the verb ‘to be’) and it still makes sense. ‘Bad’ in this case might mean guilty, or sick, but it is still an emotion, or a state of being, so ‘bad’ is correct.

However, ‘I feel badly’ is only correct when you are describing how good you are at touching something. You might feel badly, for example, if you had burns on your fingers and less sensitive tips as a result. Again, replacing ‘feel’ with ‘am’ results in the nonsensical non-sentence ‘I am badly’. Here, ‘feel’ is an action verb. I am describing my poor ability to feel, and so I describe it with an adverb.

Why an Americanism? Or at least an American-only error? It isn't, probably, but in my experience...

People say things like ‘I feel badly about not giving her my seat on the bus’ over here. In England, we would only say that if we were talking to a man called Lee: ‘I feel bad, Lee, about …’

In other words, we talk proper.