Sometimes they come back

So I had this horrible English teacher in 10th grade. Her name was Mrs. Harmon. She was old. Old as in one of my other teachers that year had her when he was in high school. She had this annoying way of talking. She would talk incessantly, stopping only long enough to take short, loud breaths. We would often pay no attention at all to what she was saying in favor of counting how many times she made that breathing sound in one class period. She would always make us write a "precis", a one sentence summary, for whatever story or book chapter we had just read. She had the worst literary interpretation I've ever come into contact with, sometimes basing her insights on a misreading of the grammar of the text. Aside from the readings, we were covering the parts of speech. What's even sadder is that most of the people in the class still didn't get it. Mrs. Harmon would say stuff like "Number L" and "Letter 12" that would make me grind my teeth. One day she told the class that there were only 6 adjectives that ended in -ly. I understand, of course, that adjectives with this ending are relatively rare, given the rule in English that -ly is typically an adverbial suffix. But I sat there and thought up about thirty on the spot. So, the rest of that semester I compiled a list of all the -ly adjectives I could think of or locate in my dictionary. I never showed it to Mrs. Harmon, but I want to say I got up to around 170-180 words. And then I lost the list somewhere in our computer change about 5 or 6 years ago.

Today, I was going through a stack of 3.5" floppy discs. In the 23 MB strewn across thirty discs or so, I found the list. I haven't gone through and counted the words yet, but I am thrilled. Trust me, one day, you too will see this list. It will be enshrined in digital website glory as a testament against bad English teachers everywhere.