Another report from Jeff Shaumeyer on Facebook:
“If you happenly want to convert …”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard “happenly” before, but it seems potentially quite useful.
A respectable number of ghits for happenly, conveying ‘happen(s) to, (as) it happens’, etc. — an adverbialization of the verb happen. (There are also some hits which seem to be mistakes for happily, but I’m disregarding them here.) Some examples:
HceIf you happenly want to add ringtones for iPhone, I will recommend MP4 to M4R Converter, which is an easy-to-use yet powerful software and helps you convert MP4 to m4r with high quality and superfast speed. (link)
Seriously ladies, no one likes a girl with straight bangs. You look gross. No one wants to look at a girl who it so happenly appears that their hair stylist used a ruler to cut your bangs in a perfect line. Let me put it this way from Napoleon Dynamite and Borat: I like yo bangs. NOT! (link)
If you happenly want to rip Blu-ray to Galaxy Tab Mac, the blu-ray ripper for mac mentioned is your best choice to convert Blu-ray to Galaxy Tab Mac with perfect output format and super fast conversion speed! (link)
Happenly, most of the cites seem to come from non-native speakers of English (many of them probably Chinese speakers), so the innovation is likely to be mostly a foreignism. The derivational formation (V + -ly = Adv) isn’t a productive one in English, but of course playful morphology (where the usual patterns are deliberately stretched) could be at work in examples like the second one above.
August 1, 2011 at 9:03 am |
As a Lancasharian, I would happily blame Yorkshire for a monstrosity like “happenly”. Although they’d be more inclined towards “‘appenly”, I suppose.
February 11, 2016 at 11:24 am |
I was listening to a Seattle radio station this morning and heard someone use “it happenly” at the end of a sentence as a substitute for “it just so happens”.