RE: lost linguistic battles (was: Re: developing countries)

From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Jun 22 2003 - 22:49:29 MDT

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    At 09:29 PM 6/22/03 -0700, Spike wrote:

    >What part of speech is it
    >when someone starts a sentence with the word "hopefully"?

    That's the part of speech known technically as the `boo boo' (not to be
    confused with the `woo woo', as in `Hopefully Jesus will be here any minute
    to fix things and plunge those atheist bastards into Hell to burn for ever').

    >How should
    >it be correctly phrased?

    A rather stuffy version would be: `It is to be hoped that X.' Better,
    maybe: `I/we hope that X', but obviously the catachresis is an attempt to
    avoid attribution of personal agency and therefore responsibility for this
    `hope'.

    Damien Broderick
    [hopefully that's helped]



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