Nathan T

That’s Not How You Use That

                  It happens all the time. People do it without even realizing it. They know not the pain they cause me and the English language. What is this travesty of which I speak? Well it’s the use of the word “good” as an adverb. Oh, how I hate it. It almost causes me actual pain to hear. Especially when TEACHERS, of all people, use it. I detest it, I hate it, I am bothered by it, I am disgusted by it, and did I say I hate it? Well maybe I’m not exactly disgusted by it, but it does quite bother me.

                  You almost can’t walk through the city without hearing people say it. You can’t even go into a school, a place of learning, without hearing it all the time. It really is everywhere. I don’t know how it spread, or even why. But you know what I’m talking about. You hear it everywhere too! It’s not even just a regional issue, this is nationwide. All of the states I’ve been too (which truthfully is not that many) had people saying it. And it’s all over the internet, too. The slimy tentacles of the monster of grammatical errors reach far.  In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever gone a day without hearing it. You can never escape its reaches, and believe me, I’ve tried.

                  Here’s an example of what I put up with. *friend walk into room* Me: “Hey man what’s up?” Friend: “Not much, man. Everything’s cool.” Me: “How’d the lacrosse game go yesterday?” Friend: “We won, it went pretty good.” Me: *twitch twitch twitch* “Went pretty good…pretty good…pretty good…pretty good” just ringing in my ears for hours. It only goes away when someone else uses some sort of grammatical error. It’s unbearable. But I push on, hoping to someday help the poor ignorant

                                                                                                                                                                                                             people of the world who do this. Some of them don’t know better, they are trying to learn English as a second language maybe, but everyone else. Just STOP.

                  I’m not too sure how it started, but I can sort of understand how/why. I mean, good has a positive connotation, right? So why not use it whenever you want to talk about something positive. I guess it’s easier than planning out what you’re going to say ahead of time.  I know it is almost exclusively an American-English thing. I’ve seen multiple British or European people agree with me about this specific subject. It certainly wasn’t a part of English back when America was just being colonized. It seems to have evolved along with the American “adjustments” of the language, for better or for worse, we shall see. Probably worse. Let’s stop it.

                  This common error can be stopped quite easily, with anyone just taking an additional couple milliseconds to use that extra 90% of our brain that we don’t normally use to know whether to use an adverb or an adjective. It’s not too hard, if you are doing something, then you use an adverb, like “well.” If you are describing something, then you use an adjective, like “good.”   As long as you try to be correct and put a bit of effort into your speech, I will be happy.