It’s my own fault, really. There are times when the happy-go-lucky side of Ken slips away and reveals deeper, darker sides and sometimes, I have to admit, I can be a real bastard of a Grammarian.
I try not to correct people’s grammar most of the time. Honestly. But I do spend a lot of time with Vicky so, like it or not, she does tend to catch a few corrections from my direction.
One of them, that I must have repeated a few times, is the difference between “well” and “good”. “Good”, as a reflection of quality, functions perfectly well as a predicate adjective. For the intransitive verb, however, “well” is preferable to “good”. And so, I tend to push that.
You see the mistake, don’t you?
I pushed a little too much!
While we were out this weekend, I gave the response “Good” when asked, “How are you?” And I didn’t provide this response just once! I gave it twice!!!!
And Vicky was in full gloat mode.
Dammit.
This, of course, led me like a drowning man to a life raft straight to my Elements of Style, a great resource when mired in rhetorical tar pits. It turns out, and Vicky’s going to hate me for this, that I was correct in responding “Good” when I did. Because I could have been referring to my state of mind rather than my physically being, making this the appropriate response in that instance.
... What? These can't ALL be about my books! ;-)
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