Hopefully (was disappearing prepositions)

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Oct 4, 2004, at 12:31 PM, alison murie (sagehen) wrote:

> ...It's not that ambiguity is bad.  Sometimes it lends richness to
> discourse,
> opens up lines of thought, adds to the impact of poetry.  The pain
> comes
> in the loss of clarity when clarity is sought, when the innovation
> becomes
> so imbedded that it drives out the precise. Kids hardly realize that "I
> hope" is available any more.

mourn no more.  speaker-oriented "hopefully" is hardly ever unclear.
in fact, it takes some work to construct examples that, in any
reasonable context, would be likely to be misleading (assuming good
intentions on the part of the hearer/reader, of course).

and then there's the impressive Copy Editor Effect, which i've written
about here before (though not, i think, under this name).  take pretty
much any innovative usage that the manuals decry because by introducing
potential ambiguity it threatens clarity, and see how experienced copy
editors deal with it.  they are virtually *flawless*.  they know
exactly which instances of "hopefully" (for instance) to replace by "I
hope" or "it is to be hoped that" or whatever, and which ones to leave
alone.  there's no unclarity here at all.

if there's a problem, it has to do with whether the innovative usage is
established, general, standard, formal, appropriate for the written
language, or whatever.

goodness knows there is plenty of real (inadvertent) unclarity and
(intentional) obfuscation in language to worry, and weep, about.  as
for the rest, "take the rag away from your face; now ain't the time for
your tears."

arnold