Tastes differently

September 02, 2008, 20:58

Kalleh

Tastes differently

I had a bad week last week. When that happens, everything goes wrong; it's Murphy's Law.

I was posting on realbeer.com, which hardly has the world's greatest grammar mavens, and I made a grammatical error and was caught. I wrote, "Guinness tastes differently in Ireland." I did think about it briefly and thought it should by an adverb because it describes how it tastes. How has always been my operative word for an adverb. However, of course it's the same as "I feel bad" versus "I feel badly."

But why exactly?

September 02, 2008, 21:26

Myth Jellies

...or should it be, "But why exact?"

September 03, 2008, 05:37

goofy

I think the idea is that taste is a "linking verb" like feel or seem or appear, and that "linking verbs" "should be" followed by adjectives. However, as MWDEU says, for every prescriptivist who forbids feel badly, there is a prescriptivist who says feel badly is ok.

September 05, 2008, 21:36

Kalleh

I liked Bob's response on my Blog entry about this. Bob, I hope you don't mind if I quote you here:

quote:
Actually it is quite interesting because "taste" is a bit of an oddity as a verb.

My slave tastes everything before I eat it.
My food tastes funny. These look superficially similar but the former would usually be followed by an adverb, the latter by an adjective. But why? In the first instance the verb is being used actively. It is an action being performed by my slave. In the second it is a "state" verb being used in the way that we would use seem/appear/sound.

"Smell" can function in similar way.

My cousin, who always puts a finger against one nostril when sniffing at something, smells funnily.