60) “Hard” and “Hardly” – Words with “-ly” endings usually are adverbs – “quickly”, “heavily”, “quietly”, “softly”, etc. – but not all adverbs end in “-ly”, and this is where “hard” and “hardly” can be confused and actually end up giving the opposite meaning of what was intended.
Hard can be either an adjective or and adverb, while hardly is always only an adverb, and as adverbs, hard means “forcefully” and hardly means “barely,” “almost not at all”:
Wrong: “The man was arrested for hardly beating his dog.”
Right: “The man was arrested for beating his dog very hard.”
The first sentence means the man barely beat his dog, almost not at all. The second sentence means he beat the dog very hard, with great force.
There is a dumb old workplace joke in English that goes:
“Are you working hard, or hardly working?”
In other words, “are you doing a lot of work (working hard), or are you doing almost no work at all (hardly working)?”
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