“Neither” and “none” serve different purposes.
- “Neither of them” is correct if you are talking about two people, places, or things.
Examples
- “The store was selling both red and yellow roses, but neither of them will look good in my garden.”
- “I have two sons, but neither of them lives near me these days.”
Grammar fact
- “None of them” is correct to describe more than two people, places, or things.
Example
- “Many universities are located in my state, but none of them is in my town.”
- “The plants in your garden are quite healthy, but none of them is native to this area.”
- Which one is correct, “Can I ask a favour from you?”, “Can I ask of you a favour?” or “Can I ask for a favour from you?”?
None of them is correct, but the second one comes close. The sentence should be: “Could I ask a favour of you?”
The first and third sentences are also formally incorrect because they use the preposition “from,” when they should be using “of.”
They all also are not formally correct because they use the modal auxiliary verb “can,” when “could” should be used. “Can” means, “Am I physically able to …?” while “could” means “Is it possible for me to …?”
- Is it “I feel bad” or “I feel badly”?
It is both. Both are correct. “Bad” as used in this sentence is an adverb. Adverbs usually end in “-ly,” but here, “bad” does not. Why? Because it is what is known as a “bare adverb”—one that does not end in “ly” but is still an adverb.
- Adverb
In English grammar, flat adverb, bare adverb, or simple adverb is an adverb that has the same form as the corresponding adjective, so it usually does not end in -ly, e.g., “drive slow”, “drive fast”, “dress smart”, etc.
The term includes words that naturally end in -ly in both forms, e.g., “drive friendly”. Flat adverbs were once quite common but have been largely replaced by their -ly counterparts.
The term ‘flat adverb’ was coined in 1871 by John Earle, and even in that time they were viewed as “rustic and poetic” because they were “archaic”. Flat adverbs were relatively common in English through the 18th century, although more so in the United States. Earle writes that the flat adverb was “all but universal with the illiterate”.
Recorded Example
One recorded example of their use is in letters by author Jane Austen. She used near, exceeding, and terrible as flat adverbs in one letter – and usage such as this was common in spoken discourse.
Although grammarians stigmatized them, flat adverbs are found to be accepted by English speakers and their usage has grown over the past century. A survey carried out in the 1960s studied people’s attitudes towards usage problems in English.
Examples
The examples “you’d better go slow” (rather than slowly) and “he did it quicker than he’d ever done it before” (rather than more quickly) contained flat adverbs – and the latter was found to be acceptable by just 42% of respondents.
However, in a follow-up in the 2010s by the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, using the same examples from the 1960s survey and others containing flat adverbs, they found that acceptance of flat adverbs has become much more widespread in recent years. Quicker was found to have an acceptance rate of 75%, while “you’d better go slow” was universally accepted.
