I hear this usage as code for “I don’t have much hope at all – go away and don’t bother me.” Many dictionaries and (]() try to say it’s no worse than regrettably or arguably, but they’re wrong it is: as Kingsley Amis observed, the person who uses it as a sentence adverb/disjunct: In the past 30 years or so, a new meaning has emerged, making the word hopefully a ((linguistics), or sentence adverb, as in “hopefully, it will be OK”. Hopefully, I will have hopeĬonsider the fate of the adverb hopefully, as in the Robert Louis Stevenson quote “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive,” where the verb or doing word – travel – is modified by an adverb, hopefully, telling us how we will feel about travelling. If you think this admission of a new meaning of literally is ridiculous, then you are on the way to being a prescriptivist. In this way, literally can mean “actually without exaggeration or inaccuracy”. The online (]() sits slightly on the fence, seeing the new meaning as an (]() a word that puts emphasis on what they are saying. So what do you think you are? Even though you may be uncomfortable being classified as someone who lays down rules, consider how you would feel if you heard a friend say, “I literally exploded with anger!” Most of us would say that this is absurd, that your friend had confused literally with figuratively or virtually.Īnd yet, as Salon Magazine points out, a number of dictionaries ( Merriam-Webster and Macmillan Dictionary) have taken the extreme descriptivist path of allowing literally to mean figuratively.
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