In Praise of Hopefully

The use of "hopefully" as an adverb ("Hopefully it will rain before the cows come home") is despised by many writers, editors and other ner-do-well's. I object! Hopefully is a useful and logical construction and should be used whenever possible. For a lucid discussion of this hot linguistic topic see:

http://www.bartleby.com/61/41/H0274100.html

That piece is from the the usage notes in The American Heritage Dictionary, edited by Geoffrey Nunberg. He wrote a good piece about the piece about usage at http://www.bartleby.com/61/7.html

Finally, if you want to see a list of usage notes from that dictionary, which is a cool way to waste a lot of time, see:
http://www.bartleby.com/61/note4index.html



Howard Yellen

You Call it Corn - I Call it Amazing

From corn we get:
Flour
Oil
Sugar
Whisky
Fuel
Starch
not to mention
Cornflakes
Popcorn
and of course Cornnuts

In fact, only 1.8% of the corn grown in the US is used as food.

Howard Yellen