Re: Good frame pump?????

In article
<0df748a0-9125-4d53-9d8a-9d1be1b05d41@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
pm <zzyzx.xyzzy@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jun 8, 1:44 pm, jobst.bra...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Carl Fogel wrote:
Hopefully, it will be there for me when I need it.
[snip]
Who hopes?
[snip]
Admittedly, you're just parroting in good faith some grammtical myth
and lore that someone (who ought to have known better) told you when
you were young and impressionable.
Regrettably, your grammatical theories are mistaken.
Understandably, you cling to them, but it's time to let go.
Fortunately, a copy of "Origin of the Specious" from the library
will explain such myth and lore in the English language.
Amusingly, each of these sentences provides an example.
Hopefully, you'll learn something.

Admittedly you are understandably and amusingly stuck with the
adverbial style that avoids expressing opinions.  Hopefully you can
rise above that style, eschewed by the overwhelming majority of
writers to convey more impact.

There you have it.  Classic trite expressions of the day.

Oh I missed "Due to the fact that..." and "Because of..." and endless
paragraphs that are offered by one "author" in this newsgroup.  I
don't understand what your aim is in this article.

I hope I made myself clear.

Or better in your view:

Hopefully, I made myself clear.

Jobst Brandt

"Speaker-oriented (or "stance") adverbial hopefully has been taking
abuse pretty steadily for 30 or more years (see MWDEU). Linguists are
mostly just baffled by this disparagement; see the discussion in the
American Heritage Book of English Usage, where it's noted that
"hopefully seems to have taken on a life of its own as a shibboleth."

I am bewildered by the quoted sentence. If it is indeed a
sibboleth, why do they go on to make a case for its use?
And how is it a sibboleth? Well, do me in, I cannot pronounce it.

But the word fits right into long-standing patterns of the language
-- cf. frankly in "Frankly, this soup stinks" and surprisingly in
"Surprisingly, this soup is delicious" -- and it provides a way of
expressing the speaker's attitude towards a proposition which is both
(a) brief and (b) subordinate: "I hope that S", "I have a hope that
S", "It is to be hoped that S", and the like are wordier, and have the
hoping expressed in a main clause (as the apparent main assertion),
while what writers want is to assert the proposition provisionally,
adding a modifier expressing their attitude towards it. So speaker-
oriented hopefully is a GOOD thing, and it's no surprise that it's
spread so fast."
-- Arnold Zwicky, Visiting Professor of Linguistics, Stanford
University, writing for Language Log

--
Michael Press

Judges 12:6
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Good frame pump?????
    ... you're just parroting in good faith some grammtical myth ... will explain such myth and lore in the English language. ... adverbial style that avoids expressing opinions. ... But the word fits right into long-standing patterns of the language ...
    (rec.bicycles.tech)
  • Re: Good frame pump?????
    ... you're just parroting in good faith some grammtical myth ... will explain such myth and lore in the English language. ... adverbial style that avoids expressing opinions. ... But the word fits right into long-standing patterns of the language ...
    (rec.bicycles.tech)
  • Re: The British Civil War
    ... It wasn't an assertion. ... It was also about expressing an appreciation of the good old US of A - ... a thread just for the sake of it. ...
    (soc.culture.scottish)
  • Re: How does Curry/Howard formalize PROGRAM calculates FUNCTION (W&S?)
    ... expressing the assertion that a is a prime number - it has no factors ... from 2 to a-1. ... That wff is not the expression that a is a prime number. ...
    (sci.logic)