Jobs & Education1 min ago
adjective -> adverb
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For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.At a guess, I'd say that neither 'sickly' nor 'sicklily' has been used as an adverb for over a century! I know it's more long-winded, but people today would tend to say "in a sickly manner" or some such phrase if they had to express the thought.
I will obviously now have to retract my claim that no-one has used 'sicklily' for more than a hundred years. I think you should contact the 'Guinness B of R'! Cheers
However all this doesn't help! I suppose I could have got round it by saying, "that sounds so sickly and sentimental", but that would not have conveyed my meaning exactly as I wished.
The fact remains that you would have been perfectly correct grammatically had you said merely 'sickly sentimental'. Cheers
Some such forms did exist, such as your suggested 'sicklily', but they have long been effectively obsolete. If it's any comfort to you, 'earlily', for instance, seems to have disappeared from everyday use even before 'sicklily' did.
Perhaps hyphenation is the solution you seek? Saying, for example, that a film has "a sickly, sweet ending" is not quite the same thing as saying it has "a sickly-sweet ending". In the former, both adjectives independently qualify 'ending', but - and this is what I was really trying to get at earlier - in the second, the 'sickly' has now been made to qualify - for want of a better word - 'sweet' rather than 'ending'. (Well, that's how I see it anyway!)
So, how about 'sickly-sentimental'? This may be what you meant when you said the non-hyphenated version didn't quite seem to say what you wanted to say. I can assure you it is a perfectly acceptable option, whatever part of speech you decide to call it.
The thing is, though, that the Americans are currently throwing hyphens away wholesale, even when they're clearly worth keeping. What they do today, we tend to do 'tomorrow', so what price my hyphen-suggestion then? Cheers
PS...The OED and Chambers Dictionary both still list 'sicklily' as an adverb form. It's worth mentioning, however, that the most recent entry for the word in the OED dates from the 1870s! Maybe 'sicklily-sentimental' is what you're after.