How Do You Feel?
Now let’s take a moment to talk about feelings.
Loose-lipped speakers and permissive writers may call me a fusspot, a nitpicker, or even an acerbic pedant, but I am nothing less than intransigent when it comes to how I feel. In other words, I make a clear distinction between feeling bad and feeling badly. When I am sick or distressed, I say I feel bad, and when the dentist gives me a shot that makes my mouth numb, I say my mouth feels badly.
In his book The Writer’s Art (1984), syndicated columnist James J. Kilpatrick offers this explanation of the distinction: “If you feel badly, something is wrong with your sense of touch; your fingers may be numb, or callused, or gloved—who knows? If you feel bad, you’re ill, depressed, worried.”
Kilpatrick also notes that “the same distinction applies to other [linking] verbs, such as smell and taste. If you smell badly, perhaps your nose is stopped up. If you smell bad, try a hot soapy shower.”
Mr. Kilpatrick and I are far from alone in our disdain for those who say they feel badly when they mean they feel bad. When the editors of the second edition of the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (1985) polled the members of their distinguished usage panel on this question, three-quarters of the panelists preferred “I feel bad” and rejected “I feel badly,” although a number of them admitted that they avoided the sticky issue altogether by saying “I feel terrible, awful, lousy, like death,” and so on. Many panelists voiced extremely bad feelings about “I feel badly,” calling it everything from “a bit pedantic” to a “dainty-ism” to downright “godawful.” The novelist and professor Isaac Asimov had this to say: “‘Feeling badly’ is the mark of an inept, dirty old man.” The compilers also quote this bit of drollery from the literary critic and editor Clifton Fadiman: “Don’t feel bad when you hear the broadcaster say he feels badly. Just remember that all men are created equally.”
The handbook of SPELL, otherwise known as the Society for the Preservation of English Language and Literature, of which I am a vice president, contains this pithy, prescriptive advice on the use of bad and badly: “It is incorrect to say ‘I feel badly’ unless you are referring to the act of feeling. If you want to describe your physical condition, ‘I feel bad’ is preferred.”
Would you like a mnemonic device to help you distinguish between bad and badly? In Grammar for Smart People (1992), Barry Tarshis offers this “memory key”: “We feel bad when we perform badly.”
