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"I feel bad."
"I feel badly."
Which is correct?
Today we discuss this common pitfall when writing or speaking, and we've brought in a special guest to help us understand it.
Catherine Winter is an editor for the American RadioWorks documentary unit at American Public Media. She also holds the distinct honor of having been called in to settle a heated debate in the Minnesota Public Radio newsroom over "I feel bad" versus "I feel badly."
"If you're going to use the phrase at all," Winter says, "I would suggest using 'I feel bad.'"
To understand the difference, Winter says one must revisit "those old friends" from grammar school, the adjective and the adverb. As a quick refresher, Winter explains that an adjective is a word that describes a noun. She gives the examples of
a blue house
a hopeless situation
the ugly stepsister.
"In those cases," Winter says, "you've got blue and hopeless and ugly and those are the adjectives."
Winter defines an adverb as a word that is used to describe a verb. She gives these examples:
the boy ran fast
she slept deeply
he spoke hopelessly
The words fast, deeply and hopelessly are the adverbs.
Winter points out that in the sentence, "I feel badly," the speaker is using the adverb badly to describe the verb feel. "It means you're saying that you lack sensory ability," Winter says, "like maybe if your hands were numb you might say, 'I feel badly.' But if you want to say that you are regretful or sad, then you need to say 'I feel bad.'"
Nevertheless, there are many people who think "I feel badly" is correct. Winter offers two possible explanations for this confusion.
First, she thinks many people got it drilled into them in grammar school that they must use an adverb after a verb. "In many instances that's correct," Winter explains, "but we have this set of verbs that some authorities would call linking verbs that tend to refer to perception. So you wouldn't say 'I feel badly' any more than you would say, 'This tastes bitterly.' You have these verbs of perception like seems or thinks or feels or looks or appears that take an adjective, not an adverb. I think a huge part of the confusion arises there."
The second source of confusion has to do with parallel structures. "The opposite of well is badly," Winter says. "If I do something well, I might do something badly. But well is also an adjective: you can feel well or you can say all is well, and the opposite of that is bad, not badly. So people tend to get confused."
According to Winter, a big reason people say "I feel badly" is because they're simply trying really hard to be right. "This is actually an example of a fascinating phenomenon called hypercorrection," she says. "It's where if somebody corrects you for an error in one circumstance, you then over-generalize and apply that correction where it doesn't actually belong."
Winter says we see this most often with pronouns: "People will say, 'He gave the pictures to Jenny and I' when it really ought to be 'Jenny and me.'"
Winter explains that at some point in that person's life, it's likely he or she said, "Jenny and me are going to the store." Someone else, likely a parent or a teacher, corrected that person, saying, "Jenny and I." This creates a false belief that whenever that circumstance arises, it's imperative to use I instead of me.
[Note: For more discussion about I versus me, listen to Grammar Grater Episode 6: I Gotta Be Me.]
"You see it in other circumstances, too," Winter says. "People will say 'seldomly' because they think all adverbs have to have -ly in them."
We asked Winter if saying "I feel badly" rather than "I feel bad" is a serious error.
"I think 'I feel badly' is arguably a more serious error than many things people call errors," Winter says. "There really is no circumstance in which that's the appropriate language to use."
She compares language choices to one's clothing choices, describing how sometimes it's appropriate to wear a t-shirt and at other times it's better to wear a tie. She extends this to speech by saying in some circumstances, it's all right to say "gonna" but and in others one ought to say "going to."
"But there is no circumstance in which it's all right to say 'I feel badly'," Winter says. "By analogy, that's sort of like not just neglecting to wear a tie-but wearing a tie on your foot."
Finally, we asked Winter if there was anything speakers and writers can do to avoid this error. "You are going to run into people who think you're wrong when you say 'I feel bad' even though I'm here to tell you you're not, you're right," she advises. "So it might be the best thing to just write around it and say, 'I regret that' or 'That made me unhappy' or 'I feel hopeless' or something like that and just avoid having anybody think you're wrong."
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Special thanks to The Morning Show's Jim Ed Poole for providing the voice of Clancy the Dog.
What do you think? Share your thoughts below.
Music from this Episode: "I Want Someone Badly" by Shudder to Think, featuring Jeff Buckley; "I Got You (I Feel Good)" by James Brown.
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Comments: 20
So the nice thing about "I feel poorly" is that it's good either way. As is typical with language, there are always exceptions to rules.
Thanks for the comment!
Deborah, I agree you're safest just skipping the whole "I feel bad" "I feel badly" problem and saying more precisely what you mean: I feel sad. I'm really sorry. I'm in an agony of regret. I have an earache.
But I can't support saying "I feel nauseous." Many sticklers for careful usage would argue that if you're nauseous, you're making other people feel nauseated. But some dictionaries do now accept nauseous to mean nauseated, and it certainly is widely used that way.
What if your nerves are really, truly not working properly? Then, the bad feeling would have absolutely nothing to do with emotions, but with the physical ability to FEEL. In short, I think Winter is WRONG. :)
"It means you're saying that you lack sensory ability," Winter says, "like maybe if your hands were numb you might say, 'I feel badly.' But if you want to say that you are regretful or sad, then you need to say 'I feel bad.'"
I meant, of course, that most usage authorities counsel against using "I feel badly" in reference to your health or emotions. On the other hand, I suppose even that rule has to have exceptions. A person who just isn't in touch with his own emotions might have to say "I feel badly." :)
I don't know if you've done this before or not but on CNN, just twice in the last week, I've heard the improper agreement of subjects and predicates.
Both times, they said something like, "None of the issues discussed were pertinent."
None of the issues discussed was pertinent would be correct.
People tend to agree the verb with the object of the preposition, rather than with the subject. Is this also becoming an accepted trend, Luke?
The fact is that usage is almost evenly divided between "feel bad" and "feel badly". Both constructions are standard English. "feel badly" is used by many writers to express an emotional response: Truman, Thurber, Doctorow, and Richler all used it. If Catherine Winter doesn't like it, fair enough. But Winter not liking something is not enough to make it nonstandard English.
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, page 437
But it seems to me that hypercorrection is often not generalized. Thus, for example, we get, "He gave the books to her and I." Here, the hypercorrection of putting "I" in the subjective case when it should be in the objective case is not generalized to the other pronoun, "her." In fact, it seems to me that one of hypercorrection's features is that it's not systematic in the way nonstandard uses in dialects are systematic.
But I'm not a linguist. I'm just an editor. So I consult expert sources about these questions. And every other source I consulted that mentioned hypercorrection at all said that "feel badly" was an example of hypercorrection. Certainly it often shares the basis for its use with other hypercorrections. At some point, someone was told, "No, dear, you did badly on your English test, not bad." That corrected person then overgeneralized, assuming "badly" must always follow a verb.
But regardless of whether it is technically an example of hypercorrection, "feel badly" seems to be nonstandard. Every source I consulted that took a position on the question argued against "feel badly." Some were quite indignant about the whole thing.
Even Merriam-Webster's isn't arguing that "feel badly" is standard English. It says "feel badly" isn't a hypercorrection, but it doesn't come down one way or the other on whether it's all right to use it.
Merriam-Webster's says that "feel bad" is "clearly the pedagogical standard" in school grammar textbooks. However, it and several other sources point out that there have been prescriptive texts in the past that tolerated or even prescribed "feel badly." And there have been terrific writers who used "I feel badly."
That's why I suggest that it's probably best to avoid saying either one. Whichever you use, someone is going to think you're wrong.
No, it seems to me that they argue that it is standard. They report that actual usage is divided, and they report that usage books are divided on the subject. There are two trends in the advice literature: "feel badly" is wrong, and "feel badly" is right. Whichever one you choose, some people will agree with you and some will disagree.
If good writers use "feel badly", and some prescriptive texts tolerate or prescribe "feel bady", then it seems clear that "feel badly" is standard English. Of course, "feel bad" is also standard English.
Also, I'm not convinced that "He gave the books to her and I" is hypercorrection either. We find constructions with object-position conjoined pronouns in subject case as early as the 16th century:
Now Margaret's curse in fall'n upon our heads,
When she exclaimed on Hastings, you, and I... - Shakespeare, Richard III, act 3, scene 3, 1593
This cannot be due to hypercorrection, since English grammar was not even taught until the 18th century.