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Was reading an article about autism (in Time), when this sentence grabbed me: But then autism research took a badly wrong turn. "Badly wrong?" Is it just me or is this particular usage exceedingly strange? - not to mention flat-out (even badly?) wrong. Can something also be goodly wrong? I bow to superior word wizards  : What say you-all? What's really scary is that the more I read it the less wrong it seems.
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descriptive hyperboleCould be, Max; thank you. Just didn't seem to fit the tenor of the article. But that was one of the reasons I raised the question here - could be the phrase is used acceptably all the time but I've lived too sheltered a life to have come across it until now  .
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Are not some "bad turns" badder (sic) than others?
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Something "going badly wrong" is somehow more acceptable to me than "a badly wrong turn." In the latter case, it seems that "badly-wrong" should be hyphenated. Better yet it should be obliterated. It is certainly stylistically awful and reads like a translation from another language (perhaps Japanese or some other non-European language) as carried out by a computer.
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descriptive hyperbole
Could be, Max; thank you
I agree with Max about the "degrees of" wrong thing. I didn't really like the "took a badly wrong turn" either, nancyk. Then I considered "took a horribly wrong turn" which sounded ok at first, but it still seems a little off kilter. If I was editing this document, I would have changed it to something like "took a turn which went horribly wrong" (definitely couldn't use "badly wrong" in that context).
Taking my corporate comms hat off, and going back to Operations now!
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>But then autism research took a badly wrong turn.
I agree, it looks awful. But I think it is wrong for another reason altogether. I'll try to explain it but I am seriously bad with the proper grammatical terms so be forgiving please. Here goes.
Isn't "wrong turn" one concept, one, ugh I don't know if noun-phrase is the right term but that's what I'll call it. It is the same type of thing as an "upper hand" or "upper body" - these are “one” thing.
In the sentence they are qualifying only the word "wrong" thus disregarding the actual noun-phrase.
It still wouldn’t be pretty but saying the research took a bad wrong turn seems better to me.
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I think badly wrong sounds terribly wrong...but, then, I use terribly wrong all the time but would never consider using badly wrong even though, I suppose, both are grammatically okay. So is this just a case of sound semantics? Or is it just that there's nothing absolutely wrong about it? The Only WO'N!
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I hope there's an editor on the unemployment line. Taking a badly wrong turn is akin to being very pregnant. Wrong is wrong, there's no comparative.
I understand what the writer is trying to say, but this is just plain bad writing.
TEd
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