Don't feel badly
A time-worn phrase gets knocked around
LAST MONTH, WHEN Bill Belichick was quoted everywhere as "feeling badly" for the injured Tom Brady, a couple of readers asked whether feel badly was good English. Shouldn't we properly be feeling bad for the Patriots' sidelined quarterback?
I've hesitated to take up the question, partly because I expect to get a bagful of e-mail explaining that it's really very simple, if people could only remember that feel is a linking verb, and thus is followed by an adjective. As a member of the "feel bad" usage crowd myself, I already know that line of argument.
But those bad feelings keep showing up in the news. Here's Belichick again, this time feeling "badly" (as who wouldn't) for fallen safety Rodney Harrison. And Bob Schieffer, who "felt very badly" for Tom Brokaw because the format of the presidential debate he moderated was so constrained. And William Shatner says continuing insults from George Takei, his former "Star Trek" colleague, make him "feel badly" (not really!).
No, they are not saying that their fingers are numb. This bewhiskered witticism first saw print in 1906, when Frank Vizetelly included it in "A Desk-Book of Errors": "Feel badly is correct when the intention is to say that one's power of touch is defective as through a mishap to the fingers."
Har de har har. I would wager my rapidly dwindling net worth that no native speaker of English has ever misunderstood "I feel badly" as a statement about the sense of touch, but this witless joke won't die. If you're more interested in historically plausible reasons for the feel badly choice, though, you can find them in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, a book every nitpicker (and nitpickee) should own.
First, notes Merriam-Webster, speakers know that feel can be modified by adverbs: "I feel differently about it, I feel strongly and passionately that I'm right." There's nothing in the appearance of feel badly to sound alarms.
Then there's the influence of "feel good" and "feel well." People who use the first of these for an emotional state and the second for a physical condition often "make the same distinction with bad and badly, choosing feel bad for health and feel badly for emotion. Harry S. Truman, for example: "You must have felt very badly when you cleaned out Mamma's closet." Or James Thurber: "We feel very badly about your only having one turkey."
Another problem is the burden of the word bad, which so often means "wicked." For Richard Bache, author of an 1869 usage handbook, this was in fact its only proper sense: "To feel bad is to feel conscious of depravity; to feel badly is to feel sick," he ruled.
Feel badly may also, for some, be an echo of the regional usage feel poorly, meaning "feel unwell."
And standard English also allows "I feel well," in which well is an adjective. That well now usually means "healthy," but it can also mean "good" or "advisable." Ambrose Bierce, in his 1909 usage guide "Write It Right," used this well in his comment on the word afford: "It is not well to say 'the fact affords a reasonable presumption.' "
Given all those cross-currents, it's hardly astonishing that some of the people, some of the time, use feel badly. And there's certainly no reason to label adherents of the Richard Bache school pretentious, as some usage mavens do.
Kenneth Wilson, in the Columbia Guide to Standard American English, sums up the situation: "Whatever line you take - to use both [bad and badly], differentiating on some semantic basis or other, to use only feel bad and proscribe feel badly, or to follow some other line - you will find some Standard users who agree with you and others who do not."
In fact, there are signs that feel bad may one day crowd out feel badly. In searches of Google, Google News, and Nexis's US news database, feel bad is ahead by as much as (very roughly) 22 to 1. So there's no need to fear the feel badly minority. For the sake of good manners and sanity, far better to treat feel badly as a simple variation, like pop for soda and bubbler for fountain, than to blow the whistle whenever it rears its head.
After reviewing the online commentary, though, I'm beginning to suspect that people fuss about feel badly just so they can repeat that feeble joke about having numb fingers. I can see that it might appeal to the kind of person who goes about tediously insisting that "I can't get no satisfaction" means "I can get satisfaction," that "a hot cup of coffee" means the cup is hot, not the coffee, and that ain't is "not a word." Please don't be that person. 