I know I’m old, really old, when current language sounds odd. Just the other day I twitched when I heard someone on TV open his remarks with “firstly...” I should have expected it, because for quite awhile I’ve been mildly irritated by speakers concluding their commentary with “lastly.” Something just doesn’t sound right to start a sentence with an adverb like that.
I had sort of gotten used to “lastly,” but when I heard “firstly” I was moved to look it all up. To my surprise, “firstly, secondly, thirdly” and so on are considered grammatically correct, and “lastly” dates back to the 16th century. Who knew?
I mentally define “lastly” as “similar to or in the manner of final.” If diagramming a sentence -- do they do that anymore in school? -- lastly would have to go on a slanted line under a verb or an adjective. It’s pretty silly to be visualizing diagrams of what I’m listening to, but that’s the price of being a former English teacher.
But digging into the firstly-lastly thing, I found that quite a few people on Reddit and Quora also questioned the correctness, and said they’d only heard it the last couple of years. And as more people in public life speak English as a second language, some academics maintained the “-ly” words happen because of translations to English.
It’s not just me. An AI-generated post agreed that use of “firstly” and “lastly” sound awkward to many people and the terms are not generally recommended for article writing.
So as an armchair critic, I get to critique what people write. Online, everybody can comment on everything, and they constantly do.
I try not to make comments on Facebook. I get in trouble when I do because I’ll say something I wouldn’t say if I were in the room with you. Facebook’s “Collinsville Residents” and various offshoots of it are a great example. If we were all sitting in the Community Center, the talk might be a lot more polite.
A darling lady I know recently submitted a “rephrased” comment, saying her first one was snatched off by Facebook guidelines monitors (I want to see that original one).
And there’s YouTube and X and Instagram, for people who have the time to scan -- fortunately or unfortunately, I do.
Content creators amaze me. I have trouble coming up with an occasional column, so I can’t imagine what it takes to create subject matter every day, not counting the technical setup of cameras, background and insertion of news “clips” to talk about. The successful creators make significant money, and for some it becomes a full-time job.
But content creators don’t depend on people who read their posts, they make their money on the comments. Even texts that don’t make any sense still count for income. You wonder if the writers are seeing their own typing -- “tryna” do something, “gonna” do something or “fixina” get it done. Giving the benefit of the doubt, most commentors probably have their little microphone punched on, so a heading like “I’m hopping you change your mind” may be due to pronunciation issues.
Lastly, any time I write, I need an editor, and now I’m lucky enough to have one. Nothing important in here, I just hope I haven’t wasted your time.
Marilyn Stokes was a public school teacher in Fort Worth for 15 years and subsequently worked at KERA public television for four years. She retired after 15 years at Ford Motor Company, Southwest Region where she was zone manager for small dealers in the southern half of Texas.