Comments on: Rotely

By: nicole

nicole — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 20:56:08 +0000

Strangely, according to Merriam Webster “timely” is attested as an adverb before as an adjective (12th vs. 13th centuries). But…I may be ready to be a hero.

By: Eric

Eric — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:23:02 +0000

No, Nicole, that would be totally, unequivocally, right. If you could keep just one person from using “timely” as an adverb, you would have done the world a service; if you could stop an entire profession from doing so, you would be a hero. At least in my opinion.
I think I’m more ok with “rotely” than with timely primarily because it’s clearly a modification of the word “rote”, and it’s pretty clear what it means. Also, replacing “memorized by rote” with “rotely memorized”, is simply replacing a two word adverbial phrase with a single (albeit made up) adverb; I suspect that was the original use of “rotely” and it seems perfectly reasonable to me. So I’m willing to call “rotely” another example of the evolution of the English language, rather than the corruption of it.
“Timely”, on the other hand, is already a perfectly good adjective. To try to use it as an adverb instead is just bad grammar. Worse, it’s confusingly bad grammar, which is far more offensive (at least to me) than the fairly innocuous “me and John went to the store” variety of bad grammar. And it just sounds bad. But I’ve gone on much longer than intended.

By: Blake Stacey

Blake Stacey — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 17:46:14 +0000

Sssh! It’s only wrong if you get caught!

Actually, after saying it over and over in my head, “rotely” has started to sound like the name of a spice. You know, some kind of root which English people ground up and put in shepherd’s pies.

Why my brain does this kind of thing, I haven’t the foggiest idea.

By: nicole

nicole — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 17:39:44 +0000

Rotely only sounds marginally horrible to me.

Timely, however, sounds insanely bad, which is bad for me because accountants use it in this context too and I edit technical accounting literature. Of course, I’m editing the codification of all U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, so I do have the power to change this…but that would be wrong.