Badly Adverbed
“This war was very badly mismanaged”
- John McCain, 2007.
I know what it is to ‘badly manage’ an enterprise, it is to manage it in a wrong or deficient way and thus fail to achieve the desired outcome or achieve it outside the set parameters. I, also, know what it is to ‘mismanage’ an enterprise; it is to manage it in the wrong or not the best direction and either fail to achieve the desired result or achieve it outside the set parameters.
‘Badly mismanaged’ is a double negative, which used to be almost prohibited; to understand why we must look at the ‘actual sense’ of what is being said: If we understand ‘to mismanage’ as to manage in the wrong direction then to do it badly is to fail to take the wrong direction and thus in ‘actual sense’ take the right direction!
Because ‘mismanaged’ is negative we must use a positive adverb in qualifying it, for example we could say ‘brilliantly mismanaged’ or ‘amazingly mismanaged’. To further illustrate the point, a synonym of ‘mismanage’ is ‘manage badly’, thus the adverb ‘badly’ is already contained in the sense of the word and there is no need to add it to the sentence.
In the last decades the prohibition of a double negative has fallen to the way side and people seem unable to grasp the inter-relationship of words in a single sentence. So that when the sentence is negative all words, adverbs and adjectives must be negative; the conformity of life imposes itself on the language.
