Heard on The Judges: "seldomly" = "occasionally"

[Laurence Horn]

>Thirty-ish, black, female speaker:
>
>"My relationship with him was basically just a friendship, but we did
>_seldomly_ hook up."

I predict Jerry Cohen would see this as a blend of "seldom" and
either "rarely" or "infrequently".  I see it as a redundant
affixation of adverbial-forming -ly on an item that's already an
adverb, as with "fastly" (which I believe we've previously debated,
and which earns 377,000 g-hits).

LH

>
>There are ca.202,000 Google hits, many of them grammatical and
>lexi(cologi)cal comments. So, though I haven't heard it before myself,
>it's hardly unknown, apparently.
>
>-Wilson
>--
>All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
>come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>-----
>  -Sam'l Clemens
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org