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