Feeling bad can be badly expressed

What if I told you that, in just a few short sentences, I could teach you something about grammar that would set you head and shoulders above a large portion of the population? Why, you’d want to send me money, right? And I’d want to let you. So, without further ado, here it is.

It’s not “I feel badly.” It’s “I feel bad.”

Actually, there are instances in which you’d want to use “I feel badly.” But those are so rare that you can go a whole lifetime without ever needing the term. If you’re saying you feel guilty, sorry for someone, remorseful or anything like that, the grammatically correct term is “I feel bad.”

But now, what if I told you that, on some level, you knew that already — that I’m just pointing out a rule that every native English speaker gets right in many other situations, even if they don’t know they know it. Why, you’d want to tear up the check you’d just made out to me and not pay me anything at all, wouldn’t you? That’s why those of you with your checkbooks already out should stop reading here. For the rest of you, here’s the deal.

How often do you say, “He seems happily” or “The dog appears hungrily” or “His cooking tastes terribly”? Never, right? You say instead “He seems happy,” “The dog appears hungry” and “His cooking tastes terrible.” That’s because you already grasp the concept we’re talking about — a concept called “linking verbs.”

“Linking verbs,” also called “copular verbs,” are the best-kept secret that everybody knows. And they’re something we’re more likely to get right if we don’t think about them. When we just blurt out our remorse, we’re more likely to say “I feel bad” than if we’re carefully choosing our words and trying to put in action those fifth-grade lessons about adverbs.

Adverbs, we’re all taught, modify verbs. They do lots of other stuff, too, but we don’t hear as much about that. We just know that if we’re modifying an action — like reading — we need an adverb. “She reads rapidly.”

The thing a lot fewer of us are taught is that this whole adverbs-modify-verbs lesson doesn’t apply when it comes to linking verbs.