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wendalyn finally got around to tackling 'momentarily' today... I will post the link momentarily. http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/
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tsuwm, will you be suing this wendalyn character for trademark violation?
Actually (sic), I'm not quite convinced that using momentarily for 'in a moment' is entirely original to North America.
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quirkily, I was only able to register 'actually' on a very local basis....
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addict
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Lately I've been hypersensitive to people using "hopefully" to mean "I hope". As in "Hopefully the weather will be nice this weekend." I suspect it's already a lost battle, but I continue fighting it hopefully.
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And hopefully you'll win.
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Lately I've been hypersensitive to people using "hopefully" to mean "I hope". I find myself muttering "adverb, adverb, adverb" over that one, too! It's beeen going on so long, tho, I fear we are in for more disappointment.
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hopelessly, this is a lost cause. (hi ASp)
consider the sorts of usage help you find in places like alt.english.usage
The disputed, passive use of "hopefully" is often referred to as "sentence-modifying"; but it can also modify a single word, as is hopefully clear from this example. :-) Most adverbs that can modify sentences -- including "apparently", "clearly", "curiously", "evidently", "fortunately", "ironically", "mercifully", "sadly", and the "-ably" examples above -- can be converted into "It is apparent that", etc. But a few adverbs are used in a way that instead must be construed with an ellipsis of "to speak" or "speaking". These include "briefly" (the OED has citations of "briefly" used in this way from 1514 on, including one from Shakespeare), "seriously" (1644; used by Fowler in his article DIDACTICISM in MEU), "strictly" (1680), "roughly" (1841), "frankly" (1847), "honestly" (1898), "hopefully", and "thankfully". Acquisition of such a use is far from automatic; for example, no one uses "fearfully" in a manner analogous to "hopefully".
AHD3 says: "It might have been expected that the flurry of objections to _hopefully_ would have subsided once the usage became well established. Instead, increased currency of the usage appears only to have made the critics more adamant. In the 1969 Usage Panel survey the usage was acceptable to 44 percent of the Panel; in the most recent survey [1992] it was acceptable to only 27 percent. [...] Yet the Panel has not shown any signs of becoming generally more conservative: in the very same survey panelists were disposed to accept once-vilified usages such as the employment of _contact_ and _host_ as verbs." AHD3 quotes William Safire as saying: "The word 'hopefully' has become the litmus test to determine whether one is a language snob or a language slob."
The OED's first citation for "hopefully" in the passive sense (= "It is to be hoped that") is from 1932...
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