moth -er -ous -il -ful -ly

While I drove home this morning, I tried to define exactly why I didn't want to go deliver the Appointment of Guardian documents to my mother's friends. It's not that I don't like her friends, they're really quite nice and I've known them for years. I tried to mentally describe the feeling. Perhaps it felt dirty to me, like the garbage or the laundry. You always have it, and it needs to be taken care of, but you try to shield it from the gaze of outsiders. And in the case of an Appointment of Guardian, you don't just march up to someone and say, "Here's a paper in case I try to die." Oh yeah, that makes for great neighborly chit chat.

But I didn't have time to ponder long, for the more pressing dilemma of grammar gripped me as I said, "and they'll look at me -- motherly?" Definitely not the right word. I had the inexplicable urge to say "motherlerly" which is obviously not even a word. Where on earth did that come from? "Motherly" is quite certainly an adjective. Like, she gave him a motherly look, and her motherly affections were clear. And I was pretty sure "they'll look at me motherly" requires an adverb. But motherlerly?

The problem, here, is that in order to make an adverb, the general rule is to add -ly to the end. Like "pretty" to "prettily", "happy" to "happily", "moist" to "moistly". But motherly already ends in -ly. And motherlyly is quite a mouthful. I thought mothererly might have come from words like "particularly." Being a native English speaker, I tend to be able to sense the correct word form. There is of course a perfectly good rule for it (like adding -ly) but I've never had to consciously think about it. I extrapolate subconsciously from what I already know. This could result in any number of mother-like words. Motherously. Motherily. Motherfully. Motheringly. Motherably. Truly English is a wonderous language.

Ever notice how "mother" looks sort of like moth-er? Like what you would call one who moths? Weird.