"Salon" magazine yesterday posted this commentary by Mary Elizabeth Williams on the OED's ruling that the word "hopefully" is old-fashioned and should no longer be used: "It was bad enough last year when Oxford edged toward edging out that most beloved and sensible of punctuation marks, the Oxford comma. This week, the venerable AP Stylebook has decreed that “Hopefully, you will appreciate this style update, announced at #aces2012. We now support the modern usage of hopefully: it’s hoped, we hope.” To which a million language nerds replied, Noooo!
Perhaps you are the sort of person who wasn’t aware that saying things like, “Hopefully, it won’t rain this weekend” has long been considered a grammatical faux pas. One hopes that you received a deeper language-arts education than that. “Hopefully” is an adverb. An adverb, I tells ya, one that means to do something in a hopeful manner. For decades, however, the word has also been a common shorthand for “I hope.”
Those of us who work with words grapple daily with the issue of where we slide and where we take a hard line. I die a little every time I see a “gonna” or “gotta,” and I’ll jump through linguistic hoops to avoid using “they” or “their” for the singular when the gender isn’t specified. There’s nothing like a note – from a teacher, for God’s sake – commanding that “Every child should bring their lunch” to make me want to switch exclusively to Latin. Yet I’m lax about ending sentences with a preposition, treat phrases like sentences for dramatic effect and use “rapey” and “stabby” and other made-up words on a regular basis. And I start half my sentences with conjunctions."
Williams goes on at greater length than I will quote here. It seems pertinent to Brian Cook's comment above that the Oxford English Dictionary says that biannual and biennial (or bi-annual and biennial) mean twice a year and every two years, but apparently does not mention semi-annual, which I learned was the word for twice a year. But I am 71 and I learned that in the late 1940s or the 1950s. When did the OED make its ruling? Am I being old-fashioned? Probably. People used to use commas much more than they do today. Language evolves; it is a standard truism of s-f writers that a 21st-century English-speaking time-traveller would barely be able to understand a 16-century speaker, and would be hopelessly incomprehensible to William the Conquerer or his contemporaries. (Never mind that they spoke Norman French and not Anglo-Saxon.) So: who is right about semiannual or biannual or biennial?
Who cares? In another fifty years, it will all be different again.
"Salon" magazine yesterday posted this commentary by Mary Elizabeth Williams on the OED's ruling that the word "hopefully" is old-fashioned and should no longer be used: "It was bad enough last year when Oxford edged toward edging out that most beloved and sensible of punctuation marks, the Oxford comma. This week, the venerable AP Stylebook has decreed that “Hopefully, you will appreciate this style update, announced at #aces2012. We now support the modern usage of hopefully: it’s hoped, we hope.” To which a million language nerds replied, Noooo!
Perhaps you are the sort of person who wasn’t aware that saying things like, “Hopefully, it won’t rain this weekend” has long been considered a grammatical faux pas. One hopes that you received a deeper language-arts education than that. “Hopefully” is an adverb. An adverb, I tells ya, one that means to do something in a hopeful manner. For decades, however, the word has also been a common shorthand for “I hope.”
Those of us who work with words grapple daily with the issue of where we slide and where we take a hard line. I die a little every time I see a “gonna” or “gotta,” and I’ll jump through linguistic hoops to avoid using “they” or “their” for the singular when the gender isn’t specified. There’s nothing like a note – from a teacher, for God’s sake – commanding that “Every child should bring their lunch” to make me want to switch exclusively to Latin. Yet I’m lax about ending sentences with a preposition, treat phrases like sentences for dramatic effect and use “rapey” and “stabby” and other made-up words on a regular basis. And I start half my sentences with conjunctions."
Williams goes on at greater length than I will quote here. It seems pertinent to Brian Cook's comment above that the Oxford English Dictionary says that biannual and biennial (or bi-annual and biennial) mean twice a year and every two years, but apparently does not mention semi-annual, which I learned was the word for twice a year. But I am 71 and I learned that in the late 1940s or the 1950s. When did the OED make its ruling? Am I being old-fashioned? Probably. People used to use commas much more than they do today. Language evolves; it is a standard truism of s-f writers that a 21st-century English-speaking time-traveller would barely be able to understand a 16-century speaker, and would be hopelessly incomprehensible to William the Conquerer or his contemporaries. (Never mind that they spoke Norman French and not Anglo-Saxon.) So: who is right about semiannual or biannual or biennial?
Who cares? In another fifty years, it will all be different again.
Fred Patten