Thusly, he wrote
Was with Kiel, one of my PhD students the other day, reading a draft chapter of his PhD thesis. He used the word ‘thusly’ and at first I thought this was a Kiel-ism (sorry Kiel, you do have a few). However, he assured me it was common usage … and not just for him. I suspected it was a regional idiom and indeed a bit of web searching finds many archaic uses of thusly, but several more recent Lancashire uses.
I suspect the word arose because ‘thus’ often precedes a verb and so has acquired an adverb ‘-ly’ ending … a form of lexical over-generalisation. … and if you have not already stopped reading because you can’t understand why anyone would be even interested in this level of language … as I did the web search found a lovely discussion site called INTERACTION (and no, this one is not the synonymous BCS HCI Group) where one person mildly mocked another for using ‘thusly’ in the 21st Century … obviously not a Lancashire lad.
This has also made me reflect on my own frequent use of ‘thus’ to mean ‘therefore’ as opposed to ‘in this way’ … argh am I really a grammar nerd :-/
You made me curious: should ‘thus’ only be used to mean ‘in this way’, or can it also serve as a synonym for ‘therefore’?
Comment by Jo Vermeulen — June 26, 2008 @ 10:40 am
I think it is often used, but not good English.
I think is is strictly acceptable to say:
“he rowed and thus got to the other side”
which means “and in this manner”
it is then a short step to write things like:
“it was a sunny day and thus she went for a swim”
The latter means simply “therefore” or “and so” and I think strictly poor English … but not 100% sure
Comment by alan — June 26, 2008 @ 1:24 pm
Thanks for the insightful explanation Alan! I’m always looking to improve my English since I’m not a native speaker
Comment by Jo Vermeulen — June 26, 2008 @ 3:24 pm
oh my good ! I once knew a guy who thought he could add ly to all adverbs ..
like well, better and much
he was still learning English though.. the consequences were pretty horrific
Comment by Sujay Rao Mandavilli — August 22, 2008 @ 8:58 am