"The horse jumped fantastic" - Zara Phillips, interviewed on the Today programme about her win at the World Equestrian Games in Germany, BBC Radio 4, yesterday morning.
Call me old-fashioned, but I expected the Queen's granddaughter to have a slightly better appreciation of grammar than this.
At first, I thought it might be a slip of the tongue in her excitement, but she repeated exactly the same mistake in two other interviews.
So: is it true that even a first class education (which she presumably received) is not sufficient to drum in the difference between an adjective (fantastic) and an adverb (fantastically: would be even better to add "well"). Or is it perhaps that she wants to achieve the common touch by speaking like her less well-educated contemporaries?
This is not without precedent: Tony Blair has developed many Estuary English pronunciations and mannerisms since he became PM, for example.
It made headlines, anyway. 
http://win3xp.blog.co.uk
29/08/06 @ 10:03