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I thought 'real' was an adjective and 'really' was an adverb?

Is it not improper usage to say things like, "I think the cake is real good" ?

Or to have a [news] websites called http://www.realclearpolitics.com/, which I suppose could be correct, though my brain does't process it right away. I'm inclined to think it is attempting to say really clear politics and not real, clear politics

Is this heavy usage and interchangeability of 'real' and 'really' something of the twitter era?

curiousgeorge
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    Try googling flat adverb. Opinion varies from "this is a common mistake" to "this is a perfectly normal locution, particularly in the United States". – Tim Lymington Jun 01 '15 at 14:47
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    Answered at The use of "real" in the following cases (which was itself closed as a duplicate, but perhaps has a fuller answer). – Edwin Ashworth Jun 01 '15 at 14:51
  • OP please check the above post and let us know. – Kris Jun 01 '15 at 14:57
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    Notwithstanding anything that the earlier post reveals, dropping the ...ly from adverbs is more common and more acceptable in America than it is in Britain. Dropping the ...ly from adverbs is a bit like eating with your fork in your right hand. – WS2 Jun 01 '15 at 15:16
  • Dropping the -ly (not just for real/really) is perfectly natural in AmE informal speech (but it does sound a little 'youthful' or 'uneducated' (i.e. dropping -ly is grammatical in a certain register, but that register is not considered proper for newspapers. As to whether 'real' is intended as 'actual', or -ly dropped for 'a lot', yes, it's ambiguous but we have no way of knowing the author's true intent. – Mitch Jun 01 '15 at 16:16
  • The above does answer my question, but my followup would be that am I alone in feeling that the use of real/really in this manner has become more common in the last 7-10 years (i.e. the rise of social media?) – curiousgeorge Jun 01 '15 at 19:40
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    What has become more common in the past half-century is writing done in close mimicry of spoken English, so that sentences like "We will have a real cool time tonight" (the refrain in the Stooges' song "Real Cool Time" from their 1969 album The Stooges) appear more frequently in writing than they used to. But in spoken U.S. English, real for really is exceedingly common and has been so for many decades, though not when educated speakers are on their best behavior. – Sven Yargs Jun 03 '15 at 01:48

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