do good (was: prescriptivism, etc)

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Wednesday, January 31, 2001 7:20 pm -0500 Tony Glaser
<tonyglaser at MINDSPRING.COM> wrote:
>
> As an Englishperson living in USland, for the me difference is not
> the humor or otherwise, it is the loss of the difference between
> "doing well" and "doing good". "Doing good" has a meaning beyond a
> light-hearted way of telling someone they did well - if I go out and
> save a person from starving/dying/being wrongfully convicted  or
> whatever, _then_ I have "done good" (even though perhaps I may not
> have done well!). In US English it seems that this use of "doing
> good" as in "doing good works" has been lost.

That kind of 'doing good/well' distinction is a noun/adverb distinction,
not adj/adv as we've been discussing.  You do much good, but you do very
well.

There's not much reason to keep a formal distinction between the two senses
of 'doing good', since there's rarely going to be a context in which the
two could be confused. One is an answer to the question "how is X doing"
and the other is an answer to "what is X doing".  In answering the latter
question, you're not likely to say "Jane is doing good" anyhow.  You'd want
to make it specific, like "Jane is doing good for the poor", in which it's
clearly the noun, or "George thinks he's doing good, but he's really doing
something horrible."  I also think the prosody's a bit different if it's a
noun versus an adjective-turned-adverb.

I am reminded of an episode in a semantics class last term.  A
(75-year-old) student thought it terrible that Americans don't have the
distinction between 'to bath' and 'to bathe' (the latter you do in the
sea).  He railed politely against me about the loss of an important
semantic distinction-- until the younger students came to my rescue and
said "but we don't say 'bath' either".  He asked me "what do you do in the
sea, then?"  And I said "we swim."

Lynne


M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320