On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, Steven Brust wrote: #At 04:17 PM 8/15/2002 -0400, Mark A Mandel wrote: #>#shorter). And the older, more useful sense of, "with a hopeful attitude" #>#is now difficult to say. No, it isn't. Almost any sentence you would have said before in which "hopefully" meant 'with a hopeful attitude', you can still say without ambiguity. Go ahead, try it. (I said this upthread, but not so simply.) 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...? That, as someone else has said, we don't always want to be perfectly precise. English-speakers sometimes are dismayed at not being able to be vague in German or Spanish about the sex of the "friend" they went out drinking with. Etc. -- Mark M.