Is It Bad or Bad for You?
If your friend is going through tough times, do you feel bad or bad ?
Correct answer: you feel sorry for him.
This is one of those cases where the wrong grammar is so widely used that the correct construction sounds wrong. Or maybe people think that a longer word … is more bizarre, kind of like saying ” use” rather than ” use . “
Quick tutorial: “Bad” adjective; bad is an adverb. Adjectives change nouns and adverbs change verbs, so maybe you had a bad cup of coffee this morning and then behaved badly when someone stopped you in traffic.
So since feeling is a verb, shouldn’t that be a bad thing ? No, and here’s why: Feel is a connecting verb. Let’s go through the dictionary .
Linking verbs are not like regular action verbs. They function only to associate a subject in a sentence or sentence with words that describe or identify that subject. And these words are either adjectives (or adjective phrases) or nouns (or noun phrases).
In English, there are several linking verbs, among which be, Beat, seem, and all sensory verbs: smell, appearance, taste, sound and touch.
You might say, for example, that these cookies taste delicious ! This is not to say that this cookie tastes delicious . This would mean that the cookie is tasting, which if you trip is fine, but that doesn’t work in your daily life.
As Grammar Girl points out, linking verbs “describe emotions or states of being” and require more careful handling than a regular action verb. “To be” is the queen of all binding verbs, and you don’t say “I am bad” after eating a cookie, you say “I am bad.” (Why is it so hard on yourself? It’s a vacation.)
If you were feeling bad , you would feel – literally touching / groping for someone or something – bad . It’s hard for me to come up with a good example of a sentence, but here is my best shot: in the pitch darkness, I was badly groping for a room. But even that, I probably would not write, because it sounds awkward. (Are examples better? Write in the comments.)
This is where the difficulty comes in: many binding verbs are also action verbs. So after a flu attack, you might wake up one morning and say, “Today I feel strong!” But you can greatly reflect on how to clean if first teeth or flossing .
Feeling bad, says Merriam-Webster, is an example of grammatical overcorrection – people are so eager to fix things that they jerk the grammar wheel too hard in the other direction. (A rival vocabulary reminds us that “between you and me” is another example of overcorrection.)
Is that clear? It would be bad for me if it were not for this.