Comments on *Adverbs That I Kill on Sight Grammar tips for the real world.2022-06-20T14:31:01Zhttp://www.grammarunderground.com/adverbs-that-i-kill-on-sight.html/feedWordPress
By: Harshal Harshalhttp://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003405427419http://www.grammarunderground.com/?p=1245#comment-36592012-02-12T20:47:36Z2012-02-12T20:47:36ZOne (bad) resoan people still get upset."Hopefully" differs from most other sentence adverbs in that when you write it out as a clause you have to use a past participle than a simple adjective. To take your examples: AMAZINGLY — it is AMAZING that; STRANGELY — it is STRANGE that; FORTUNATELY — it is FORTUNATE that. For "hopefully" to be analogous to these, you would have to write, "it is HOPEFUL that"; but instead we chop off the FUL and make it "hoped." Ignorant sticklers think this is wrong; they see the HOPE and they see the FUL and by their amazing powers of resoaning they decide that "hopefully" can only mean "full of hope." They commit what any linguist or anybody who’s breezed through a few articles by linguists will tell you is called the "etymological fallacy": words don’t mean what they used to mean, and you can’t figure out what a word means just by looking at it. As you noted, people have been using "hopefully" to mean "it is to be hoped" since the 18th century; by any standard, the usage is legitimate.
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