A Word, Please: A suffix makes a word, but is it the preferred form?

Here’s a bit of free grammar advice I found online, offered up by a self-appointed expert who thought he could help all us poor, misguided grammar ignoramuses: “‘Firstly’ isn’t a word.”

This bold statement of fact was part of a mini-lesson on the horrors of beginning sentences with “firstly,” “secondly” and so on. It was based on an old refrain that goes like this: It’s OK to start a sentence with “first,” “second” or “third” because these are truncated ways to say, “The first thing is” or something like that. But “firstly” and other forms ending in “ly,” opponents say, are wrong. These are adverbs, whose job is to modify verbs — to describe actions.

So, following this logic, people figure that if you say, “Firstly, I went to the store,” you must mean that you went to the store in firstly manner. That is, because adverbs describe the manner of actions, “firstly” must necessarily point at “went,” describing the manner in which you went. If that were true, “firstly” would be terrible indeed. But of course, it’s not.

There are two things wrong with this argument. First, adverbs don’t just describe actions. Many can also work as sentence adverbs, whose job is to modify or add meaning to whole sentences.

Take for example the sentence “Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend the meeting.” The adverb, unfortunately, isn’t describing the way that an action took place. It’s casting additional information over the entire sentence. It’s saying “It is unfortunate that,” but it’s doing so in adverb form. That’s what sentence adverbs do.

Obviously, really, surprisingly, frankly and many other adverbs modify sentences all the time, and people who object to “firstly” never seem to have a problem with them.

Second, all this is moot if, in fact, “firstly” is not a word, which was the main basis of the self-styled expert’s argument. So is it?

For most words, establishing legitimacy is easy. You just check a good dictionary. If it’s in there, it’s a word.

But even if it’s not in there, it may still be legit. That’s because — per dictionaries’ own instructions — prefixes and suffixes, when combined with existing words, can form new terms that are legitimate even though they don’t have their own dictionary entries.

So if it’s not in the dictionary but you created it by adding a prefix or suffix to another word, it’s probably acceptable.

Plenty of words that were formed by adding a prefix or suffix to an existing word are already in the dictionary. Uncommon, amoral, statewide, bilateral and many others have their own entries.

What’s the difference between the ones that make it into print and the ones that don’t? Popularity. The dictionary’s job is to document how the language is used. Common terms make it in, less common ones don’t.

For words not formed with prefixes and suffixes, dictionary admission is everything. If it’s in there, it’s valid. If not, not. Prefixes and suffixes form the only exceptions. We can take “first,” tack on “ly” and thereby create the word all by ourselves.

But we don’t have to. Webster’s New World College Dictionary has an entry for “firstly,” defining it as: “in the first place; first: used chiefly in enumerating topics.” Merriam-Webster’s and American Heritage do the same.

So “firstly” is legitimate. But is it good? That’s another question entirely. We can all decide for ourselves whether we prefer the stiff, self-conscious tone of “firstly” and “secondly” to the plainer, less-pompous “first” and “second.” If you want my purely subjective opinion, I say stick to the shorter forms.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at [email protected].