A Word, Please: I won’t stand wrongly accused of misuse of ‘wrong’

Good questions have been piling up in my in-box lately. Ed in Albany, N.Y., had a question about a recent column in which I mentioned people “who just won’t stop using the word ‘over’ wrong.”

Here’s Ed: “Isn’t the last word of that sentence intended as an adverb and shouldn’t it then be ‘wrongly’? Just a thought!”

That’s a good thought. It’s logical. Plus it’s expressed in terms so reasonable that they stand in stark contrast to the first time anyone called into question my use of the word “wrong.”

“One cannot use anything ‘wrong,’ only ‘wrongly,’” a reader named Mario instructed me back in 2005. “In your incorrect use of ‘wrong,’ there is no doubt that you are wrong. I therefor [sic] challenge you to admit your mistake in a follow-up article for all to read. I am not holding my breath.”

Just days later, another reader had similar thoughts: “‘Wrong’ can be used as a noun or an adjective, but never an adverb.... I look forward to reading your ‘mea culpa’ in your next article.”

Can you see why I felt an immediate fondness for Ed?

Here’s how I responded to those other two in a 2005 column: “Please open your dictionaries to the word ‘wrong.’ Please see that following the first cluster of definitions under ‘adj.,’ adjective, comes the abbreviation ‘adv.,’ adverb. ‘Wrong’ is an adverb. And you are both wrong.”

We’re taught that adverbs are like adjectives except they end in ly and instead of describing nouns they describe verbs. That horse is beautiful. That horse runs beautifully. Her voice is perfect. She sings perfectly.

That’s true often, but not always. Sometimes words without “ly” endings are adverbs. (She sings well.) Sometimes words with “ly” endings are adjectives. (She is lovely.) Sometimes words with “ly” endings are nouns. (They are a family.) Some words do double duty as both adjectives and adverbs. (That car is fast. That car goes fast.)

“Wrong” and “right” are weird members of the adverb club because they have “ly” forms, but over time, “rightly” and “wrongly” became somewhat specialized. We see them in forms like “She was wrongly accused” or “the rightly guided caliphs.” But we don’t see them much in forms like “She did it rightly” or “You’re doing it all wrongly.” So as an all-purpose adverb, “wrong” is usually right.

I also got an interesting question recently about hyphenation. Hyphens create “compound modifiers,” words that work together to modify another word. (A flesh-eating virus. Lead-based paint. A girl-crazy fellow.)

But what do you do when the compound is not two but three words and two of them are already sort of a team? That is, if you want to say that a recipe was inspired by a greasy spoon, would you write “a greasy spoon-inspired recipe” or “a greasy-spoon-inspired recipe”?

To say that your patio is shaded by an olive tree, would you write “an olive tree-shaded patio” or “an olive-tree-shaded patio”? Those two excellent examples were offered by a reader named Al, who deserved a better answer than I could give him.

Hyphenation rules aren’t iron-clad. Style guides use very loose language to explain them, leaving gray areas up to the writer’s best judgment.

But if you want my two cents, both of Al’s examples should have not just one hyphen but two. An olive tree-shaded patio leaves open the possibility of a patio painted an olive color and shaded by an oak tree. The extra hyphen, in this example at least, shows at a glance that all three words are working together to do one job.

And this ease of comprehension is what hyphens are supposed to do.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.