Dear native speakers of English,

my friend and I have just come back from a cafe. The place was appalling. And to lighten things up, we started creating a "letter of complaint" in our heads - just for the hell of it :) But there were so many points on the list that suddenly we were faced with a question: how far can you go in enumerating ideas in a letter or an essay using

FIRSTLY - SECONDLY - THIRDLY...? ...? ...?

Are there words like "fourthly, fifthly" and so on?

And is there a limit?

Interesting! 

I know what you mean about the cafe - if things are really appalling, it can tip over into being really funny. I recall a restaurant experience my husband and I had a while ago. We asked for moules mariniere (mussels). When they came, they were practically all closed and of course, they are supposed to be open. We called the waiter over and he asked if we wanted a sharp knife to prise them open. 

As for your letter, if there are so many points to make, I would use bullet points. Or, if you want continuous prose, you could use: On top of that/Unbelievably/ To make matters worse/Much to our dismay, we found that.... etc. I think if you keep numbering, fourthly, fifthly, sixthly etc topped off with �And finally �... It would be fine as it would serve to highlight your exasperation. And you could vary it with �And my fifth point is..� �Unbelievably, I am having to make a sixth complaint�... 

To add my modest non-native reply to Lynne �s excellent answer, it would seem very awkward to keep enumerating your arguments using the adverbs derived from ordinal numbers; though not quite grammatically incorrect, sixthly, seventhly, eighthly sounds quite robotic to me... just as you would avoid using в-седьмых, в-восьмых, в-девятых  in your mother mother tongue.

 

Giorgi 

Thanks, dear colleagues!

It really seemed weird to me to use "fourthly" etc, but I could remember no rule against it - that �s why I asked... Looks like "all reason is for it, but all healthy instinct is against it" :) Never again then!

Have a lovely weekend!