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I've met the following sentence in a rather poorly written text:

"While life happened both good and bad, they were persistent in sticking to the program rules, looking for options to solve their mental health issues."

Is "happened both good and bad" okay? It should be an adverb, in my opinion, or is it some sort of a set phrase?

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The words "good" and bad" describe the noun "life", and so should be adjectives.

So the meaning isn't that "life happened well and life happened badly", but "good life happened and bad life happened". The ordering is idiosyncratic. The phrase "both good and bad" is parenthetical.

The whole sentence is rather oddly phrased. The meaning of "life happened" is not very clear. I suppose it means "events in their lives happened", but it is not very well phrased, I feel.

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