Opera Nut

I'm more worried about the fact that America has an adverb shortage. As in:

"Think different". Should be "think differently".

This mistake is all over the place.

I also saw a TV graphic on a celebrity gossip tv show that said "FLU THE COUPE".

AAGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

:banghead:

JB01

It describes the speaker's attitude to the action described by the rest of the sentence. As Stephen Pinker pointed out in The Language Instinct , people who object to this use of "hopefully" are really objecting to an entire class of sentence constructions in which an adverb is used in this way:

Thankfully, he made it out alive.

Fortunately, the diagnosis was negative.

Sadly, the response came too late.

etc.

beastmaster

To the contrary, its sense is crystal clear. If you cannot understand that "healthy" can have two meanings depending on the context, you must be baffled by words like "cleave," which means both to separate and to resist separation, or "sanction," which means both to condemn and to tolerate! Context supplies the relevant meaning.

Using "healthful" to describe food has its own "logical" pitfalls. For example, we don't use "beautiful" to describe the thing that gives us beauty -- we use it to describe the thing that *has* beauty. Thus wouldn't it be *illogical* to use "healthful" to describe the thing that gives us health? If we are going to be "logical" about things, shouldn't we use "healthful" to describe the person who *has* health? Or would you rather we say the woman is "beauteous" and the cosmetics she wears are "beautiful"?

Dictionaries are de facto correct because they describe common usage, which is the only measure of "correctness" in language. In any event, there is nothing illogical about using "healthy" to describe both food and people. Just like there is nothing illogical about any word having more than one meaning depending on the context.

"Hopefully" describes the attitude of the speaker. It is a more concise rephrasing of "I am hopeful that I do not die."

Totalitarianist

It is wrong.