Context: My friend had just finished her exam.
I asked: "How did you do?"
She replied: "Good."
Then we got into a debate whether "good" or "well" was the correct response.
She believes "good" because its slang/informal and becomes an article when standing alone in a single word sentence.
I argued it's an adjective not appropriate in this context, whereas "well" is an adverb so it can be used alone. Also, answering "good" on its own is more colloquialism than slang.
Thoughts?
You're right, Shai. To answer a question like "How did you do?" you need an adverb. Adverbs often end in -ly, so possible answers are "wonderfully", "badly" or "terribly". "Good" doesn't have a form ending in -ly, but the one word "well" does duty as the adverb equivalent of "good". So the answer should have been "well".
However, in colloquial speech, some people use an adjective instead of an adverb: "How did you do?" "Terrible!" Someone who speaks like that will then use "good" instead of "well".
This isn't German (where "gut" would be correct). I don't generally hold either to prescriptive approaches or buy the Latin based/biased grammatical categories (see e.g., Croft's Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations: The Cognitive Organization of Information, or just about any work on construction grammar), but to the extent one is interested in the "correct" response granted a certain degree of rules necessary for communication and the admission that, despite the changes of these rules and the degree to which they are defined by constructions rather than parts of speech or similarly highly schematic rules/grammatical rules, then "good" qualifies an NP or noun. As "goodly" isn't a commonly used word any more (see below), "well" is the word to use.
"c1275 (▸?a1200) Laȝamon Brut (Calig.) (1963) l. 5367 Liuius Gallus go[d]liche [MS goðliche; c1300 Otho wel] werede.
a1375 William of Palerne (1867) l. 169 God graunt hem his blis þat godly so prayen!
c1405 (▸c1390) Chaucer Melibeus (Hengwrt) (2003) l. 810 Ye han wel & goodly answerd.
a1450 Generides (Pierpont Morgan) (1865) l. 1554 (MED), She liked him so goodelie in hir thoght.
c1485 (▸1456) G. Hay Bk. Law of Armys (2005) 136 Wage is gevin anerly for seruice gudely maid.
1535 J. Mason in H. Ellis Orig. Lett. Eng. Hist. (1827) 2nd Ser. II. 55 Here be many Cyties, butt nother great nor peopled, nother yett goodly buyldid.
1865 J. W. Carlyle Let. 3 June in Lett. & Memorials (1883) III. 261 You are so good about writing that you deserve to be goodly done by."
(source: OED).
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