From this morning's Washington Post:

The barbarians have done it, finally infiltrated a remaining bastion of order in a linguistic wasteland. They had already taken the Oxford English Dictionary; they had stormed the gates of Websters New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition. They had pummeled American Heritage into submission, though she fought valiantly she continues to fight! by including a cautionary italics phrase, usage problem, next to the heretical definition. Then, on Tuesday morning, the venerated AP Stylebook publicly affirmed (via tweet, no less) what it had already told the American Copy Editors Society: It, too, had succumbed. We now support the modern usage of hopefully, the tweet said. It is hoped, we hope.

Of course, the writer could not refrain from injecting a little anti-Catholic bias into the budding peace-process:

You know these kinds of arguments. You know them well. Linguistic battlefields are scattered with the wreckage left behind by Nauseated vs. Nauseous, by Healthy vs. Healthful, by the legions of people who perpetuated the union between regardless and irrespective, creating a Frankensteinian hybrid, irregardless.These are the battles that are fought daily between Catholic school graduates, schooled in the dark arts of sentence diagramming and self-righteousness, and their exasperated prey. They are fought between prescriptivists, who believe that rules of language should be preserved at any cost, and descriptivists, who believe that word use should reflect how people actually talk.

The full story of the capitulation may be found here.N.B. (if this abbr. is still allowed by the AP Stylebook) to those suffering from partisan battle fatigue: words eleven through thirteen on line eleven are intended jocularly and will hopefully be taken as such.

Robert P. Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, is a longtime Commonweal contributor.

Also by this author
© 2024 Commonweal Magazine. All rights reserved. Design by Point Five. Site by Deck Fifty.