![]() ![]() I’m not uninterested in your blog, Stan (and thanks also for the link to Ben Yagoda) My usual position is anti-pedant, so I don’t have a problem with words developing new and different meanings. As Yagoda writes, “the old meaning could be a really good meaning, which no other word conveys precisely”. I see little sense in rejecting the newer sense of hopefully (as the AP Stylebook does), but there can be times when it’s to our advantage to retain a traditional sense and resist semantic drift. There is no hard and fast rule we must assess each case and decide for ourselves. ![]() If someone is required to judge a contest, and you say you would be disinterested, they could easily get the wrong idea.īen Yagoda’s recent article in Slate looked at some of these words and pondered the respective merits of holding on to a particular meaning or embracing an alternative one. The potential for misunderstanding is greater here than with hopefully. I grew up taking this word to mean “impartial”, until I began to notice it used as a synonym for “ uninterested”. So when we use hopefully, there’s a possibility it will bother some people or give them pause. Other people are unaware that hopefully can be used the older way at all. ![]() Some people prefer this traditional sense, and reject the later one as an error (or even an enormity, which, incidentally, is a word with similar trouble). But there is an older sense still in use, meaning “feeling or showing hope”: She left the audition hopefully. Its widespread modern use is as a sentence adverb to express the hope that something will or won’t happen: Hopefully it won’t rain today. ![]()
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