Good & Well; Bad & Badly

Good (adjective) describing a noun.

Well has three meanings:

    1) A hole with some liquid in, like water or ink.

    2) Someone who is healthy, e.g. Are you well today?

    3) Something done expertly, e.g. He rode well, my car drives well, it is well-written.

Bad (another adjective) describing a noun.  He is a bad writer.

Badly (adverb) describing a verb (He drives badly)

                                                adjective (It was a badly drawn picture)

Double Negatives

Double negatives used to be used in Standard English long ago, but now they are only really used in American ghetto talk (Black English Vernacular), so yo man, don't ya go tellin' some nigga rappa that his English is wrong, he might do something nasty to you.

Today in Standard English, using the second negative logically cancels the first negative so that the sentence means the OPPOSITE of what you wanted it to mean.

e.g. "I don't want no chocolate" means "I want chocolate", not "I don't want chocolate"

    since you can read it like this "I don't want (no chocolate)."

Fix these problems by dropping one of the negatives.

Logical Comparisons

1.    When we compare something, make sure you are comparing apples with apples and oranges with oranges, like you did in maths, e.g. don't compare an article in a magazine with a whole newspaper, rather compare a newspaper article with a magazine article or a newspaper with a magazine.

2.    When we use the comparative, we are showing how something is separate from the  other/s.  e.g He is sillier than any other boy.  If we simply said "any boy" without "other", it would include him in the group of boys and he can't logically be sillier than himself, can he?

3.    When we use the superlative, are showing how he is the top or bottom of a series/row/sequence, so we must include the others with him, e.g. He is the silliest of all my family. (He HAS TO BE one of the family, right?)

Comparative and Superlatives

These actually can be tricky.  

When to add more/less/most/least and when to add -er?

If the word is one syllable, add -er or -est

If the word ends in -le, -ly, or -y, add er or -est.  e.g. simple/simpler, silly/sillier, tiny/tinier.

If the word is two or more syllables, add more/most/less /least, e.g. splendid/more splendid.

Some Irregular Comparisons

Apostrophes

There are two uses of apostrophes: to shorten phrases or to show ownership - which is also a way of shortening a phrase.

a.    Shortened words (the apostrophe is put in place of the missing letters)

b.    To show possession/ownership

A simple one-rule-fits-all lesson: place the apostrophe after the thing/s that owns.

In formal English, don't use the possessive apostrophe for a thing, a thing doesn't have life so it can not own (but we definitely use it in conversational English).

E.g. the leg of the chair (only, not the chair's leg); the foot of the hill (only, not the hill's foot), the rays of the sun (the sun's rays), the work of a week (a week's work).

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Last modified: Monday May 26, 2003.