At 04:17 PM 8/15/2002 -0400, Mark A Mandel wrote: > >#The argument that it changed therefore it is useful and good will not, I >#think, stand up to close examination. To take the classic case, most >#people have now accepted "hopefully" to mean something vaguely like, "I >#hope," "you should hope," "we hope," and "all right thinking people ought >#to hope," all rolled into one. It is less precise than any of those, and >#longer than half of them (what people usually mean is, "I hope" which is >#shorter). And the older, more useful sense of, "with a hopeful attitude" >#is now difficult to say. The change has pretty much happened, but I cannot >#imagine how it could be construed as improving the language. > >Ah, you don't like imprecision? You must be very unhappy with English, >which, unlike German, fails to force its speakers to distinguish a male >friend (Freund) from a female one (Freundin) and an intimate "you" (du) >from a polite one (Sie)... let alone Hebrew, which distinguishes male >"you" (atah) from female "you" (at). --- Oh, but German *does* have a >word that means just what the newer use of "hopefully" covers: >hoeffentlich. I've already answered the latter--no it doesn't. As to the former, well, yes, I like precision. And the problem with this is...?