Page:The American Language.djvu/243

Rh the great masses of the plain people, it goes without saying, it flourishes unimpeded. The cautions of the school-marm, in a matter so subtle and so plainly lacking in logic or necessity, are forgotten as quickly as her prohibition of the double negative, and thereafter the adjective and the adverb tend more and more to coalesce in a part of speech which serves the purposes of both, and is simple and intelligible and satisfying.

Charters gives a number of characteristic examples of its use : "wounded very bad," "I sure was stiff," "drank out of a cup easy," "he looked up quick." Many more are in Lardner: "a chance to see me work regular," "I am glad I was lucky enough to marry happy," "I beat them easy," and so on. And others fall upon the ear every day: "he done it proper," "he done himself proud," "she was dressed neat," "she was awful ugly," "the horse ran O. K.," "it near finished him," "it sells quick," "I like it fine," "he et hoggish," "she acted mean," "they keep company steady." The bob-tailed adverb, indeed, enters into a large number of the commonest coins of vulgar speech. Near-silk, I daresay, is properly nearly-silk. The grammarians protest that "run slow" should be "run slowly." But near- silk and "run slow" remain, and so do "to be in bad," "to play it up strong" and their brothers. What we have here is sim- ply an incapacity to distinguish any ponderable difference be- tween adverb and adjective, and beneath it, perhaps, is the in- capacity, already noticed in dealing with "it is me," to distin- guish between the common verb of being and any other verb. If "it is bad" is correct, then why should "it leaks bad" be incorrect? It is just this disdain of purely grammatical reasons that is at the bottom of most of the phenomena visible in vulgar American, and the same impulse is observable in all other languages during periods of inflectional decay. During the highly inflected stage of a language the parts of speech are sharply distinct, but when inflections fall off they tend to dis- appear. The adverb, being at best the step-child of grammar as the old Latin grammarians used to say, "Omnis pars orationis migrat in adv erbium" is one of the chief victims of this an- archy. John Home Tooke, despairing of bringing it to any