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Secondly vs. secondarily?

Subject: Secondly vs. secondarily?

From: "Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>

To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>

Date: Mon, 5 Aug 2002 14:55:25 -0400





Patricia Blount wonders: <<... if some kind soul will help me clarify the

distinction between the two words "secondly" and "secondarily". I have

looked up both definitions in three different dictionaries and I know both

are adverbs. "Secondly" is the adverb form of "second" and "secondarily" is

the adverb form of "secondary".>>



That's the correct distinction between the two, and as a result, they are

not synonyms except in one specific case. When used at the beginning of a

sentence or elsewhere to modify the entire sentence, both serve as sentence

adverbs, and modify the entire sentence. With "secondly", the sentence comes

second in a sequence. With "secondarily", the previous sentence introduced

the most important (primary) point, and the current sentence is simply

providing useful but less-important (secondary) information.



The two meanings overlap when the sequence is "in order of importance, here

are the things I want to point out". In that case, secondly is correct (the

sentence is number 2 in the sequence) and so is secondarily (because number

2 is less important than number 1). Which one to use depends on which of

these properties you wish to emphasize.



--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada

580 boul. St-Jean

Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada

"User's advocate" online monthly at

www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/usersadvocate.html

"When ideas fail, words come in very handy."--Goethe



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