In the early days of television, Ed Sullivan would declare, “We have a really big show tonight,” stressing the first syllable of that fourth word, “really.”
As a kind of syntactical contrast, I recently saw an ad state “It’s a real good story,” omitting the “ly” that turns the adjective “real” into the adverb Ed was so fond of.
“Real good” is syntactically problematic, a usage error that our brains have to fix. Without knowing the terminology, our English-trained brains have learned to expect a noun after an adjective, or perhaps even another adjective as in “big orange pumpkin.” When our brains encounter “real good story” it is momentarily perplexed.
A pumpkin can be “big” and “orange” because both words reasonably describe the pumpkin. But “real good story” is different because “real” joins “good” in modifying “story,” producing the illogical “real” story. The story might be good, but is it also “real” and if so in what sense? No, “real” is trying to modify the adjective “good” as a kind of intensifier, but adjectives cannot modify other adjectives. They seek nouns, and in my example jump over “good” to land on and modify “story,” producing the nonsensical “real story.” That is a syntactical confusion our brains recognize and fix by understanding that “real” should be the adverb form of “really” so it can do its proper job of modifying the adjective “good.”
As Ed knew
In my opening example, our brains would be happier with “really” instead of “real” producing “really good story.”
Another adverb choice would be “very,” which means essentially the same thing as “really.” It works better because “very” is clearly an adverb while “real” is close enough to “really” to sound OK, but our brains might well have stored in them a phrase such as “real world,” or “real time,” in which “real” is doing its job as an adjective. That being the case, our brains might be momentarily perplexed when instead of the expected noun, it is asked to process another adjective, and resists at least for the moment, declaring error, “I don’t do adjectives.”
Perhaps my readers at this point are shrugging their figurative shoulders because this usage “problem” would not occur to them. They have heard it so many times and they are indifferent to the terminology, adjective or adverb, who cares, I understand the sentence anyway.
Yes. The sentence would not confuse anybody. But in the brains of those who understand it, even seemingly immediately, and without any knowledge of terminology such as “adverb” or “adjective,” those brains still have to readjust their comprehension process that will pause for a moment on “real” because that word does not usually appear before any other adjective, whether the brain recognizes its adjectival form or not. These syntactical patterns are coded into our brains, enabling us to understand and communicate in our shared language. Arguably any usage, no matter how minor, that disrupts, even for a moment, is to that small degree an impediment to immediate comprehension.
That syntactical pattern certainly was ingrained in my brain before I could tell the difference between an adverb and an adjective, knew the terminology or cared about that distinction. I don’t think Ed was trying to make a grammatical point. More likely, he needed two syllables to create the emphasis he desired to drive home the idea that something special — Elvis or The Beatles — was about to fill our television screens.
Watching old black-and-white Ed Sullivan’s shows taught me a little grammar usage before any teacher or grammar book did. Hearing that extra “ly” syllable was a lesson painlessly absorbed.