Shadow

Ok, I need some help with English.

I desperately wish to affectionately express my appreciations to GNU AWK, a wonderfully simple yet life-savingly useful little program for text file processing.  Now you see the pattern of my personal a-dver-buse, and hence my question above.

No, I don’t mean to say "the lovely, useful little program". The program itself is not lovely — it’s just an ugly, syntactically haphazard, command-line-only EXE file on my computer. (Hey, did I just use "-ly" 3-in-a-roll, if you count "only" as "on-ly"?) It’s only the using-it part that is particularly pleasing.

No, I don’t mean to say "the lovingly useful little program" either. I don’t love it. I am just happy using it.  

"Lovely" is one of those strange adjectives that ends with the typical adverbial inflection "-ly". "Ugly" is another. There are (or is?) a bunch of them, and someone probably has a list somewhere.

Oddly enough, "lovely" did have an adverbial useage, some point in the past. It’s gone, out of the minds of most English speakers that are still alive (not "lively", which is another "-ly" adjective).

lovely - Definitions from Dictionary.com

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) - Cite This Source - Share This love·ly      /ˈlʌvli/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[luhv-lee] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation adjective, -li·er, -li·est, noun, plural -lies, adverb

–adjective

1.	charmingly or exquisitely beautiful: a lovely flower.

2.	having a beauty that appeals to the heart or mind as well as to the eye, as a person or a face.

3.	delightful; highly pleasing: to have a lovely time.

4.	of a great moral or spiritual beauty: a lovely character.

–noun

5.	Informal. a beautiful woman, esp. a show girl.

6.	any person or thing that is pleasing, highly satisfying, or the like: Every car in the new line is a lovely.

–adverb

7.	Nonstandard. very well; splendidly.

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[Origin: bef. 900; ME luvelich, OE luflīc amiable. See love, -ly]

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 9:40 am and is filed under Odds'n'Ends, Linguistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Edit this entry.