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 simply an incapacity to distinguish any ponderable difference between adverb and adjective, and beneath it, perhaps, is the incapacity, already noticed in dealing with "it is /me/," to distinguish 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 disappear. The adverb, being at best the step-child of grammar--as the old Latin grammarians used to say, "/Omnis pars orationis migrat in adverbium/"--is one of the chief victims of this anarchy. John Horne Tooke, despairing of bringing it to any [Pg228] order, even in the most careful English, called it, in his "Epea Ptercenta," "the common sink and repository of all heterogeneous and unknown corruptions."