--- On Fri, 19/12/08, Abhijit Menon-Sen <[email protected]> wrote:
> From: Abhijit Menon-Sen <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [silk] Pet Peeves and Pedantry, was: How Risky Is India?
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Friday, 19 December, 2008, 1:52 AM
> At 2008-12-18 11:40:27 -0800, [email protected] wrote:
> >
> > If you are nostalgic about my outbursts of linguistic
> pedantry on
> > Silk, we can go into why the 'h' in
> 'hour', 'honour' and 'honest' are
> > silent, and why this is not the case with
> 'history' or 'hippopotamus'.
>
> Yes! Do tell.
>
> > Permit me to offer up a favourite gripe of my own:
>
> And here are some of mine: the use of "hopefully"
> to mean "I hope that",
> "nauseous" to mean "nauseated", and in
> Delhi, "until" to mean "while".
> (Yes, really. "We can't have the meeting until
> he's not well.")
>
> -- ams
Noooooo.
'Hopefully' is too jejune a mistake to hate very hard. On par, I should say,
with 'Be rest assured'.
Surely pet peeves should be hatred of subtle error, not of the grosser follies.
Add more friends to your messenger and enjoy! Go to
http://messenger.yahoo.com/invite/
