On Public Broadcasting, no less, the reporters seem to have a new favorite descriptive phrase : " a wide array." Makes my teeth itch. My Oxford CD has strictly military meanings and Atomica says its sometimes an elaborate arrangement.
I'm sure the modifying of "unique" has been discussed ad nauseum
Also on my list is the practice of referring to what you hope will be an annual event as a First Annual.
I dislike the use of 'effect' as a verb. I've brought this up before, and found out it is in effective use as a verb. But it sounds so close to affect, which is a verb 98% of the time, that I think people are going to start using them interchangeably. Grr.
Yep, 'fraid so, Jackie. I am already finding the two words interchanged in many of the essays I mark - and this, friends, is not a reflection on the youth of today - the essays that are handed to me are written by "mature students," typically people in their mid-forties and upward.
" a wide array." Makes my teeth itch. My Oxford CD has strictly military meanings and Atomica says its sometimes an elaborate arrangement.
The Concise OED that lives in my study has considerably more meanings that that, both as a verb and as a noun. "To dress or adorn with display" v.t. or "an imposing or well-ordered series of persons or things" n
the essays that are handed to me are written by "mature students," typically people in their mid-forties and upward.
Just because people are "mature students" shouldn't mean that they learned to spell any better than us young folk. Some people, both young and old, just don't care if things are spelled quite correctly - or punctuated correctly. (I DO care, by the way.) Otherwise "mature" shop owners wouldn't write things like:
PS I heard someone apologising for the radio transmission being halted "momentarily" today after there had been a two second gap in the broadcast. It made me smile.
Probably "an extensive series" rather than wide. The words aren't totally interchangeable, but I feel that they are near enough in meaning to be used in very similar contexts to convey the same idea.
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.
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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