![]() When we hear that someone is feeling bad, our first instinct is often to comfort them in some way. Submit I hope you’re feeling better soon. I hope you’re getting your strength back.I hope your appetite is starting to come back.I hope your energy levels are starting to come back.I hope you’re starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.I hope you’ve started to turn a corner.I hope you’re beginning to feel better about things.I hope your spirits are starting to lift.I hope things are starting to look up for you now.I hope there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for you now.I hope your symptoms are starting to improve.I hope you’re slowly but surely getting better.I hope you’re feeling better day by day.If they get away with it by bamboozling their listeners, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they got away with begging, borrowing or stealing the question.25 Unique ways to say I hope you feel better Perhaps people who say this imagine a dog begging for a biscuit. All this begs the question…ĭon’t get me started on begs the question: this is a logical error (“I like rock and roll because it’s the best kind of music around”) and not a synonym for prompts/suggests/gives rise to the question. Perhaps people have become less certain about giving a straightforward “I hope” from 1838 onwards. Obviously the old adverb-only meaning of hopefully is there in the lower line, as well as the new sneaky disjunct/sentence adverb one, but the two trends together are suggestive. While this is not as precise as some statistical techniques, the diagram is suggestive. You can do the same thing just by going to Google Ngram on the net. ![]() This is the Google Ngram Viewer, drawing upon particular bodies of text over a long time (this body of text is 5.2 million books, with this slice in 2009 American English). When we track the use of the open “I hope” with “hopefully” over a long period, using techniques called corpus linguistics, we see an interesting trend: There may even be a case for saying the more incompetent an organisation or person is, the more you will hear disjuncts all over the place (well, hopefully not). How about may, with luck, or even I hope? Or even better: “Our standard procedures for locating baggage are state of the art: I think we will get them back for you quite soon.” In other words, if an airline clerk says, “Hopefully, your luggage will turn up,” you should be very afraid. We can see the true workings of hopefully as a weasel word. ![]() This is what is called a squinting modifier: are they starting hopefully, or are we speculating that it may occur at a certain time? Ernest Gowers and Bruce Fraser in Plain Words give this example: “our team will start their innings hopefully immediately after tea”. ![]() It is also different from other disjuncts in that it can cause ambiguity in syntax, or sentence construction. ![]() Kennedy he can’t say ‘with luck’, which is all he means so he says ‘hopefully’ and basks in a fraudulent glow of confidence. Kennedy’s favourite, ‘I am hopeful that’, without being J. …can’t say ‘I hope’ because that would imply that he has surrendered control of events he can’t really use J. I hear this usage as code for “I don’t have much hope at all – go away and don’t bother me.” Many dictionaries and (]() try to say it’s no worse than regrettably or arguably, but they’re wrong it is: as Kingsley Amis observed, the person who uses it as a sentence adverb/disjunct: In the past 30 years or so, a new meaning has emerged, making the word hopefully a ((linguistics), or sentence adverb, as in “hopefully, it will be OK”. Hopefully, I will have hopeĬonsider the fate of the adverb hopefully, as in the Robert Louis Stevenson quote “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive,” where the verb or doing word – travel – is modified by an adverb, hopefully, telling us how we will feel about travelling. If you think this admission of a new meaning of literally is ridiculous, then you are on the way to being a prescriptivist. In this way, literally can mean “actually without exaggeration or inaccuracy”. The online (]() sits slightly on the fence, seeing the new meaning as an (]() a word that puts emphasis on what they are saying. So what do you think you are? Even though you may be uncomfortable being classified as someone who lays down rules, consider how you would feel if you heard a friend say, “I literally exploded with anger!” Most of us would say that this is absurd, that your friend had confused literally with figuratively or virtually.Īnd yet, as Salon Magazine points out, a number of dictionaries ( Merriam-Webster and Macmillan Dictionary) have taken the extreme descriptivist path of allowing literally to mean figuratively. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |