There was outrage last week when it was found that the Oxford English Dictionary had listed one sense of literally as ‘virtually, as good as’ — in other words, the reverse of its established meaning. Pedants were literally up in arms (in the new sense). The funniest thing was that the offending entry in the OED had been inserted in 2011, and the pedants hadn’t noticed for a couple of years.
So I thought I ought to see what else the dictionary-makers had been doing on the quiet. I started with hopefully. This word is much deplored when used to mean ‘it is to be hoped’. In that sense, it applies to the whole sentence, and is thus known as a sentence-adverb. The OED hasn’t changed its entry for the word since 1989, when it commented on the disapproved sense: ‘Originally US.
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