Drive Safe: In Praise of Flat Adverbs - Merriam-Webster Ask the Editor
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Uploaded by MerriamWebsterOnline on Aug 5, 2011
You don't have to end all your adverbs in -ly to talk right. See more videos at http://www.merriam-webster.com/video/index.htm
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@PallyWally80305 Can you find your grammatical error?
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I think people say "drive safe" because they don't understand English grammar. I think people started using adjectives in place of adverbs because they don't think about what part of speech the word is of. So they just use the shortest form of the word. Not to be too harsh, but I think it's laziness or ignorance that leads to the simplification of language rather than a conscious effort to make language more useful. But yes, it's complicated...and not all that important usually.
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In French, adverbs always end in "ment" after the adjective is written as a feminine word eg. "nice" translates as "gentil" which becomes "gentillement" as an adverb "gentille" being the feminine version of "gentil"
but it gets complicated as sometimes the "m" gets doubled with the ending being "mment" instead of "ment" and at times the words get slightly modified "frequent" becoming "frequemment" and "e"s replaced by "a"s sometimes
and it's eve more complicated in Hindi...-__-
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And she's cute, too.
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@wecaan She hangs out with nerds.
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She said: The other night, my parting words to a friend were: "Drive safe!" At which point, another friend chimed in "..ly!"
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can anybody tell me what she said': the other night, my ??? warned ??drive safe!
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Haha, if you LIKE flat adverbs, You should LOVE German, because in that language all adverbs are flat.
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I love this. Let's be careful in correcting next time. She really hates 18th century grammarians. :)
robby2hollywood 3 months ago 4
Wow. I just realized how all those seeming(ly) nonsense words on the wall behind her are examples of flat adverbs. :)
TheNatedoggx 4 months ago 3