Can you fly this plane and land it? Surely you can't be serious. I am serious and don't

call me Shirley. That exchange from the movie Airplane is presented gratuitously to Spotlight

Adverbs ending in LY, our topic for this week. Before we get into adverbs in more nuanced

applications, let's have a quick refresher on adjectives and adverbs and the differences

between them. An adjective modifies a noun or a pronoun, the red apple, the warm sun,

silly me. An adverb can modify a verb, an adjective, another adverb or a whole sentence.

Our dvark smiled slightly. Slyly modifies the verb smiled. They engaged in a hotly contested

campaign. Hotly modifies the adjective contested. Squiggly danced very badly. Very modifies

the adverb badly. Fortunately nobody noticed. Fortunately modifies the whole sentence.

You may have noticed that three of the four adverbs had LY endings, and that's not unusual.

Many adverbs are just adjectives with the LY suffix. Accidental becomes accidentally.

Perfect becomes perfectly. Loving becomes lovingly, foolish becomes foolishly, and so

on. I'd list them all but we'd be here indefinitely.

Adverbs that end with LY aren't adverbs of course. Family and elderly among others.

Family is a noun that can be used as an adjective, a family outing. Elderly is most commonly

an adjective, the elderly daredevil, but it can be used as a collective noun as in this

phrase, caring for the elderly. In the case of the word bodily, the LY suffix turns a

noun, body, into an adjective, bodily, as in bodily functions. But bodily can also be

used as an adverb, as in Cindy removed Bruno bodily. On the other hand, if you tack

an LY onto the noun ear, you get early, which can be an adjective and an adverb, but

has nothing to do with hearing, unless your parole hearing is early, I suppose.

You can see from these variations and similarities how confusion can arise easily.

...