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The Write Way 17 May 2002 Hope springs eternal ... Greetings, There must be Something in the Air about this time of the year, something that leads otherwise sane, perfectly well-adjusted souls (such as ourselves) to embark on endeavours that can only end in tears. This time last year we ripped up our entire front garden and laid pavers out there ... Now I know that that might raise a few eyebrows for those of you who live in Northern climes ... but out here it's all perfectly respectable. Read why here. The front looks great now - the palms have grown and we've planted out a mass of ornamental perfumed gingers, bougainvilleas, cannas, New Guinea Impatiens and gardenias so that it smells as good as it looks ... But we were getting restless - those stirrings became longings and turned into wild urges that we just couldn't control - so we're at it again! We've turned our attention to the back garden this time and are in the throes of having a deck added.
A semi-trailer arrived last week and unloaded timber and steel and compressed fibro cement (or is it concrete?) then one man (count him ... one) arrived to install the patio across the full ground floor of the house. (We've had this discussion before - but just to clarify: the ground floor is the one you walk into from the ground ... the first floor is up the first flight of stairs. So if you have a two-storey house, as we do, the ground floor is on the ground and the first floor is Up.) So, no, we didn't put a patio underground! How he managed to do it so easily and quickly, I'll never know - but he did it and in one day. Then he started on the deck (which opens from the top floor of the house.) The first indication that all was not going according to plan was the arrival of aforementioned semi with another load of steel poles, followed a couple of hours later by a truck bearing yet another, longer, pole. A great many phone calls, the arrival of assorted men in suits with mobile phones permanently affixed to their ears led me to only one conclusion - something was rotten in the state of Denmark. And sure enough, it appeared that the factory had sent too few of something, a too short something else (although it was only short on one end!) and the plans didn't show how to attach the roof of the deck to our existing roof ... sigh ... I knew it was all going far too smoothly ... We were a little apprehensive when we went out to see how the support beams were to be attached to the wall of the house and saw that all that stood between us and the Hereafter was a U-channel with a 30mm (one inch) lip taking the weight of the entire deck and roof and whatever we put on it. The builder jokingly said, "She'll be right - as long as you remember to only half-fill your glass of beer when you go out." Ha-ha-ha ... I keep saying to myself, "Think of steel ships - who'd have thought they could float ... engineers know what they're doing ... steel ships ..." The frame finally went up and then it was time to lift the sheets of flooring material up and onto the supports. These sheets were 1200mm x 3000mm (about 4' x 10') and weighed about 100kg (220lb) each. Needless to say one man was not going to be able to manage! Four men arrived to help lift each sheet up to where it could teeter precariously on the support beams and then be pushed and shoved into place - some 4m above the ground. I couldn't watch - there were men in their normal business clothes and shiny-soled shoes tippy-toeing around on the beams, dragging these huge, heavy sheets backwards towards the edge of the deck ... But it's done now and all we have to do is paint the railings and put down the tiles ... that's all. Hopefully, everything will be finished soon and we can go out on our deck when the sun's over the yardarm and have drinkies as we watch the boats sail past to Moreton Island ... Some of you may have started to twitch at that use of 'hopefully.' Hopefully is the adverb from the verb 'to hope' and it means 'in a hopeful fashion.' As an adverb, it needs to be attached to a friendly verb (or an adjective or another adverb) and it needs to make sense, in other words, it needs a subject capable of doing the hoping. Lavinia looked hopefully at the phone but it sat there, mute, unaware of her desperate need to be invited to Reginald Smythe-Ffaulke's fancy dress party. (How did she look at the phone? In a hopeful fashion.) It's often used to mean, 'it is hoped,' as in the first example above, and while many authorities frown on that usage as being colloquial, others see it as acceptable. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary states: In the early 1960s the second sense of hopefully, which had been in sporadic use since around 1932, underwent a surge of popular use. A surge of popular criticism followed in reaction, but the criticism took no account of the grammar of adverbs. Hopefully in its second sense is a member of a class of adverbs known as disjuncts. Disjuncts serve as a means by which the author or speaker can comment directly to the reader or hearer usually on the content of the sentence to which they are attached. Many other adverbs (as interestingly, frankly, clearly, luckily, unfortunately) are similarly used; most are so ordinary as to excite no comment or interest whatsoever. The second sense of hopefully is entirely standard. And dictionary.com shares this view: Usage Note: Writers who use hopefully as a sentence adverb, as in Hopefully the measures will be adopted, should be aware that the usage is unacceptable to many critics, including a large majority of the Usage Panel. It is not easy to explain why critics dislike this use of hopefully. The use is justified by analogy to similar uses of many other adverbs, as in Mercifully, the play was brief or Frankly, I have no use for your friend. And though this use of hopefully may have been a vogue word when it first gained currency back in the early 1960s, it has long since lost any hint of jargon or pretentiousness for the general reader. The wide acceptance of the usage reflects popular recognition of its usefulness; there is no precise substitute ... It might have been expected, then, that the initial flurry of objections to hopefully would have subsided once the usage became well established. Instead, critics appear to have become more adamant in their opposition. "I hope we'll be there in time for lunch, but I suspect we won't make it." "Hopefully, we'll be there in time for lunch, but I suspect we won't make it." Most people find that the first of these is fine, while the second is strange and even bizarre. The reason appears to be that `hopefully' means something like `I hope and expect that', and hence the speaker of the second is doing something weird: she's simultaneously asserting that she expects to be in time and that she expects to be too late. Most interesting. The Cambridge dictionary states: Hopefully (=I hope that) we'll be in Norwich by early evening. "Do you have a cigarette?" he asked hopefully (=wishing the answer to be 'yes'). My Webster's says it means 'in a hopeful manner; with hope or confidence' and that's good enough for me! The best way is to avoid using 'hopefully' to mean 'it is hoped that' in formal writing - save it for colloquial use only - a bit like your favourite baggy pants that you only wear around the house. Thank you to everyone who has supported my Running Away Fund - remember, it's purely voluntary ... no compulsion whatsoever ... entirely up to you ... I don't want you to feel in any way pressured ... don't give a thought to my starving family, sobbing in the corner for want of a crust of stale bread ... you just go out and have a good time ... we don't mind sitting here in the dark ... alone ... 1. Click here to subscribe for a full year OR 2. Use your credit card on my secure order form: http://www.write101.com/fund.htm (You can also access the PayPal subscription link from this page if the link above didn't work for you. With PayPal, you can use your credit card, PayPal account or pay online using your own cheque account.) OR 3. Send a cheque: http://www.write101.com/fund.htm Here are some more of those terrific puns that Maitiu McCabe sent: Without
geometry, life is pointless. When you dream in colour, it's a pigment of your imagination A
successful diet is the triumph of mind over platter.
A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother. This week's quiz: I don't know about you, but I had fun finding those words last week - here are some more, but no cheating. Have a think about them, look for bits that are similar to other words you know and see how many you get right: herpetoid, durn, boation, peroration, endeshabille, zeoscope, arvicoline, traulism, osciloscope, quinsy 1. apparatus for determining the alcoholic strength of a liquid by mans of its boiling point 2. stammering 3. the concluding part of a speech where the orator emphatically recapitulates the principle points of the argument 4. an inflammation of the throat 5. a supporting mine timber; door post 6. resembling a reptile 7. instrument that visually records an electric wave on a fluorescent screen 8. a loud roar 9. living in the fields 10.in a state of undress Thanks to Marcus Pailing for finding the (ahem) "deliberate" misuse of the apostrophe last week ...
"peoples'
"? Tut tut.
All
the best
Marcus
PS:
only a little dig, as I know you feel the same way as I about apostrophes.
Love the newsletter, by the way :-))
All I can say is that my fingers get tangled at times ... and I missed it completely in my proof-reading. To test, I should have remembered the OF rule: ... teaching the children OF other people = other people's children. "People" is the plural of person, so it doesn't add S apostrophe to show possession, just apostrophe S (like children's). "People" can also refer to a "body of persons sharing a common religion, culture, language, or inherited condition of life" in which case it's a singular noun that needs S to make it plural and then it can be "peoples' beliefs/ values etc" ... or ... children! See? I knew I could wangle it so that I was right! Woodrow Wilson described them as men bent on "an expedition of profit," who used "the negroes as tools for their own selfish ends." Horance Greeley, while running for President, said they were "fellows who crawled down south in the track of our armies, generally at a very safe distance in the rear." And in the South they were hotly condemned as "the larvae of the North," "vulturous adventurers," and "vile, oily, odious" ... uneducated, penniless exploiters of the freed slave, jackals who plundered a devastated South ... Who are we describing in such glowing terms? Why, the carpetbaggers, of course. I came across this somewhat less than appealing group while I was researching something else (which has completely vanished from my little grey cells now ...) and it prodded me to pay another visit to Larry Lowrance's Carpet Bag site: http://NashvilleDepot.com where I came across this fascinating little piece of information: Tales emanating from the South about the sordid deeds of some scurrilous opportunists called “Carpetbaggers” were widely circulated by exploitive politicians and a willing press. Fearing guilt by association, carpetbags were forsaken by their owners and banished to the attics and trash piles of yesteryear. Aren't we a funny lot? Fancy dispensing with something as useful as a carpet bag just because some rather unsavoury characters used to carry them! Last week's quiz: Some of you rather unkindly suggested that I'd made these up - but they're all proper words ... really and truly. I just flipped through my trusty Webster's (unabridged 1956 second edition) until I found words that looked interesting and these are what I found: palimpsest, parvenu, latimer, horology, horripilation, cachinate, golem, sniggle, tergiversate, usurp 1. parchment that has been used more than once that still bears some of the previous imprint - PALIMPSEST (This comes from two Greek words, palin 'again' and psen 'to run.') 2. an upstart - PARVENU (We pinched this directly from the French!) 3. one having a knowledge of Latin - LATIMER (This is a bit of a cheat word - it IS a real word, but it was obsolete in 1956 ...) 4. the art of making time pieces - HOROLOGY (Another word derived from Greek - from hora 'hour' and the suffix -logy 'the science of.') 5. getting goose bumps - HORRIPILATION (Here's another vying to be my favourite new word - it comes from a Latin word, horripilare meaning 'to bristle with hairs' and perfectly describes that sensation when the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and shivers go down your spine ... just sort of rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? Hor-RIP-i-la-tion ...) 6. to laugh loudly or too much - CACHINATE (Another derived from Latin - from cacchinatus which means 'from echoic origin.' You know those people whose laugh echoes around inside your head until you could just scream? Their cacchination leads to delicious thoughts of what could be done with blunt objects ...) 7. man artificially created, an automaton - GOLEM (This comes from a Hebrew word that originally meant 'embryo' but later came to mean 'monster' ... Now you can see why Tolkien called his quirky little character, "Gollum," can't you?) 8. to catch eels by pushing bait into their burrows - SNIGGLE (I just love this word - I've been trying all week to work it into a conversation - alas, without success. It comes from a Provincial English word for eel, 'snig.') 9. to desert a cause; to equivocate - TERGIVERSATE (OK - just to show how much we owe to the Romans - here's yet another word derived from Latin - tergiversari means 'to turn one's back.') 10.to take power by force - USURP (This was an easy one ... ) Have you ever wondered about the
origin of some of those idiomatic expressions we use every day? Here are some
carefully researched, definitely 100% accurate explanations - really ... Baths consisted of a
big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the
nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally
the children-last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could
actually lose someone in it - hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out
with the bath water." Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man "could bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and "chew the fat." Aaah - love it! Stephen Gard got these from his cousin - without doubt, a person of infinite wisdom! Please encourage your friends and rellies to subscribe - just send them this link: mailto:WritingTips-subscribe@yahoogroups.com It's much easier than you having to forward the newsletter to them every week. A Little Something Extra this week comes from Larry (the Carpetbagger ... oops, sorry ... the Carpet Bag maker) who found these examples from the competition run by the Washington Post. Here are some of the worst analogies ever written: "She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again." "From the attic came an unearthly howl. the whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy" comes on at 7pm instead of 7:30." "Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a movie this guy would be buried in the credits as something like 'Second Tall Man'." Oxymoron: Hopelessly optimistic Word of the week: Ventripotent (adj) with great capacity or appetite for food Sounds much better than greedy, doesn't it? I should have used this Latin phrase last week: Abutebaris modo subjunctivo. (You've been misusing the subjunctive.)
Jennifer To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: mailto:WritingTips-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com or go to the web site, at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WritingTips This menu will also let you change your subscription between digest and normal mode.
Click here to subscribe for the next year: To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: mailto:WritingTips-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com or go to the web site, at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WritingTips This menu will also let you change your subscription between digest and normal mode. |
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