Linguistics - Since when has "Did good" in place of "Did well" become acceptable?

by Wheream_I

I don't know if this is officially accepted, but I've been noticing more and more. In TV shows, people no longer say "Good job man, you did well." It's always "Did good." I also never hear people say "Did well" these days.

It annoys me because they have very different meanings. If you did well that means you performed at a higher level. If you did 'good' it means you saved a babies life or stopped a crime. Superman does good, people do well.

keyilan

"You did good" in this sense has been acceptable in certain dialects at least since the 70s, likely much earlier. You can find it in use in New York Magazine from 1972, for example, which would only be the case if it were something readers would already understand as dialectal variation of "you did well". That you notice it often now doesn't really signify that it's a recent thing.

It annoys me because they have very different meanings. If you did well that means you performed at a higher level. If you did 'good' it means you saved a babies life or stopped a crime. Superman does good, people do well.

Actually for people who are using them in that way they don't have very different meanings. They both mean "you did well". The sounds that make up "you did good" can have more than one meaning. Language isn't math.

Language means what it's speakers mean it to mean and listeners believe it to mean, and nothing more. If it's become truly widespread to mean "you did well", then that's just what it means. It's not likely to go away in the near future, and it's just one of many changes that are happening with the language. By the time your grandchildren are old enough to be having this discussion, they'll have found something else to be annoyed with, just as your grandparents would likewise think something you now consider correct was problematic and meaning something different than how you mean it.

All language is constantly in a state of flux, and just as people today complain about meanings being lost and people speaking poorly, so have people before them going back generations, yet we soldier on.