I am not a professional communicator, however, and it really upsets me when, the ‘experts’ on TV/Cable news obviously don’t even remember what we all should have learned in grade school.

The other thing which is noticeable from some of the respones above is that the personal pronoun (or “I” for those who don’t understand “personal pronoun”) is by tradition capitalised.

Surely the writer is expecting someone to comment on one of his last setences, “Another century or so, and the difference between those who speak good and those who speak bad will disappear.” In international English, it should say, “… those you speak well and those badly/poorly.”

Question: why do Americans always say, “I feel badly”? That’s bad grammar. If you can feel good, then you can feel bad – it’s the adjective’s opposite. I feel good/bad, pretty/ugly, hungry/full…

Surely ’stupid’ is a complement…

Please teach your children proper vocabulary and speech techniques.

Fops parrot this dunce-riddled mantra chanted by the High Priests of the Church of Academia.

The same set of sounds exist today as have for 100,000 years.

Only beliefs of folks change through time.

With changed beliefs comes a willingness to take on a new protocol — same words, new meaning; new word links, new meaning.

Folks become beguiled by adverbs in the Pidgin Latinate (Contemporary English aka ModE) since most adverbs have come from Latinate Old French.

Few come from Frankish Old French, Norman Old French, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Middle Dutch.

Since most adverbs of the Pidgin Latinate get built from sounds not used often by speakers of North Sea English, these words fall upon deaf ears or worse, muddle listeners.

These Latinate words carry less meaning for folks born as North Sea English speakers (folks from forefathers of 17th c. Britain).

High Priests of the Church of Academia and their toady followers fail to see that written words are not spoken words; spoken words are sound phrases; sound phrases become electromagnetic radiation to which brains respond.

Just as a clever guitarist picks runs of sounds (note phrases) that make our brains sing, so does the clever speaker who says the right words one after another.

Word order is important only because sound order is important.

Speakers of Pidgin Latinate with their adverbs from Latinate Old French and other sources have a nasty habit of shoving their adverbs wildly within their speech.

They do so because they lack a rich wordhoard of name words, doing words and phrases.

Most adverbs give nothing to their speakers and do nothing for their listeners.

Why say “He ran quickly [to his next class].” when you can say “He dashed [head down].”?

In addition, I think most BrE speakers I know would say, “The sun shines brightly”. And they would never say, “Do it real quick!” but rather, “Do it quickly!”

“The last written word from General Custer in 1876 was “Come quick, bring packs”.”

Yes, an excellent example, albeit one composed under some pressure.

“Wait a second … that should be ‘quickly,’ shouldn’t it?”

And in the interest of accuracy, it should be pointed out that he was actually a Lieutenant-Colonel.

The argument that the world is dumbing down has been around since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. I enjoy this column, and this one was fun to read, but I disagree with this sentiment in the last paragraph. You can blame those who haven’t been sufficiently educated (or should I say “sufficient educated?”) but the fact is that language does evolve. Some of that evolution is driven by the least educated among us, and some by the best educated. But no one can dictate exactly how it’s going to go.

I think this is a perfectly natural change. Two parts of speech with similar function are becoming fused into one. That’s not so outlandish in a language where, as you rightly point out, the rules for their form and spelling are confusing and incoherent. It’s only natural for speakers to try to simplify and reduce the number of rules they need to remember. Indeed, I’m quite sure that the very best writers of English in the future will still be able to inspire us using these new parts of speech – I propose calling them “adverbjectives” – and there will still be plenty of fun rules and exceptions surrounding their use for English teachers to test their students on (for example, the high crime of ending a sentence with a preposition .

I much more strongly agree with your earlier sentiment: “One should neither wring one’s hands nor weep on hearing this news.” Of course we may miss some of those old uses – like “hardly” in its original connotation – but how much fun to see where this dynamism will take us next, and what new meanings there will be?

So this development is not that new.