'good'

[Kate Wolfe-Quintero]

Don't you think that 'you did good' comes from 'you did something
good' which is ultimately 'you did something that is good'?  It's not
an adverb in the sense of you did it well, but an adjective with
ellipsis of 'something'.

>We recently discussed this distinction on the American Dialect
>Society listserv, and we agreed that "You did good" could mean what
>you suggest (noun=a good thing/deed) but that it usually doesn't in
>its current idiomatic usage.  It's a congratulatory comment, after,
>e.g., a good sports play or a good exam score, and even (!)
>professors use it, though in a somewhat jocular manner (in what
>Gumperz called a metaphoric switch to colloquial usage).  There's
>clearly no misunderstanding the speaker's meaning.
>

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***************************************************************
Kate Wolfe-Quintero
Associate Professor, PhD Program in SLA and MA Program in ESL
Department of Second Language Studies
University of Hawai`i at Manoa
Director, Hawai'i English Language Program
1395 Lower Campus Rd. MC 13-1, Honolulu, HI  96822
email:  katewq at hawaii.edu
phone:  (808) 956-9909
fax:    (808) 956-2802