The Penguin Dictionary of American English Usage and Style : A ...

154 good and well
“. . . Has gone” would have been correct.
“The child had opened the car door,
climbed in, and went to sleep,” a newscaster
said on nationwide radio. “. . .
And gone” would have been correct.
Has, have, or had does not mix with
“went.” Went is the past tense of the
verb go. The past participle of go is gone.
Therefore a correction of the first example
is either “The drug activity went
down . . .” (in the past tense) or “The
drug activity has gone down . . .” (in the
present perfect tense).
In the second example, deleting “had”
would permit “went to sleep.” Keeping
“had” requires “gone to sleep.” Someone
seemed to have forgotten that “had”
applied to three participles: “opened
. . . climbed . . . and gone.”
See also COME and GO; Tense, 1, 5.
GOOD and WELL. A Polish leader
was toasting the American president in
Warsaw. A metropolitan newspaper in
the United States quoted him, in part,
this way:
What is more, we were able to meet in
a friendly atmosphere. And I believe
we have felt well together.
The defect can easily be forgiven if the
Pole was speaking in English. It is more
serious if he was speaking in Polish and
this was an English translation.
A correction: “we have felt good together,”
that is, happy, content, or optimistic.
In the context of feeling, well
usually pertains only to health. On rare
occasions it pertains to touch or the ability
to feel things.
“I feel well” means I suffer no sign of
illness. (Feel is not modified by well. Feel
acts there as an intransitive verb, also as
a linking verb: It links the subject, I, to
the verb’s complement, the adjective
well. Or, in the sentence “We felt good,”
it links we to the adjective good. See
FEEL.)
In the sense of health, “I feel good” is
quite informal; “she’s not good” is dialectal.
One is well or feels well.
A baseball umpire said, in an interview
on a radio sports program, “We
cover the games pretty good.” Change
“good” to well. Here it means properly
or skillfully. (In this context cover is
modified by well. This time well is used
as an adverb. Cover is a transitive verb.
“Good,” not being an adverb, cannot
modify a verb. Usually good is an adjective,
which modifies a noun: good boy;
the food is good.)
Interviewed on a television “magazine,”
a designer of military aircraft said
about one of his planes, “It worked
as good or better than we expected.”
A partial correction: “It worked as
well. . . .” (Well, an adverb, modifies
worked, an intransitive verb.) A further
correction: “as well as or better than we
expected” or “as well as we expected or
better.” See AS, 3.
An essayist on that program said later,
referring to a supposed winner of two
monetary prizes, “Mary’s doing pretty
good.” She is doing well (adverb), not
“good.” If she were performing charitable
deeds, one could say “She is doing
good.” (Good would be used as a noun.
There would be no place for “pretty.”)
Still later, a reporter on the same program
correctly used both words in the
same sentence: “Before he did well [became
successful], he did good [performed
altruistic acts].”
GO OFF and GO ON. Occasionally
the phrase go off is ambiguous. It can
mean the same as go on—even though
off and on are opposites, as anyone who
has flipped an electric switch knows.
Go off can have these contradictory
meanings: (1) to take place (“The show
went off as planned”) and (2) to discontinue
or go away (“The show went off
the air”).
The execution of a prisoner was hours
away when the news came that the