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Geoff Nunberg, the linguist contributor on NPR's Fresh Air, is the author of the book The Years of Talking Dangerously.

There was something anticlimactic to the news that the AP Stylebook will no longer be objecting to the use of "hopefully" as a floating sentence adverb, as in, "Hopefully, the Giants will win the division." It was like seeing an obituary for someone you assumed must have died around the time that Hootenanny went off the air.

But these usage fixations have a tenacious hold. William Safire once described the "hopefully" rule as the litmus test that separated the language snobs from the language slobs. And the rule still has plenty of fans, to judge from the 700 comments on The Washington Post's story about the AP's decision.

That floating "hopefully" had been around for more than 30 years in respectable venues when a clutch of usage critics, including Theodore Bernstein and E.B. White, came down on it hard in the 1960s. Writers who had been using it up to then said their mea culpas and pledged to forswear it. Its detractors were operatic in their vilifications. The poet Phyllis McGinley called it an abomination and said its adherents should be lynched; and the historian T. Harry Williams went so far as to pronounce it "the most horrible usage of our times" a singular distinction in the age that gave us expressions like "final solution" and "ethnic cleansing," not to mention "I'm Ken and I'll be your waitperson for tonight."

You wouldn't want to take the critics' hysteria at face value. A usage can be really, really irritating, but that's as far as it goes. You hear people saying that a misused "hopefully" or "literally" makes them want to put their shoe through the television screen, but nobody ever actually does that what it really makes them want to do is tell you how they wanted to put a shoe through the television screen. It's all for display, like rhesus monkeys baring their teeth and pounding the ground with their palms.

Of course, even if you find the tone of these complaints histrionic, you can often sympathize with their substance. I feel a crepuscular wistfulness when I hear people confusing "enormity" with "enormousness," or "disinterested" with "uninterested." It doesn't herald the decline of the West, but it does signal another little unraveling of the threads of literary memory.

People get so worked up about the word that they can't hear what it's really saying. The fact is that "I hope that" doesn't mean the same thing that hopefully does.

- Geoff Nunberg

But the fixation with "hopefully" is different from those others. For one thing, the word itself is so utterly inconsequential is that the best you've got? And then there's no rational justification for condemning it. Some critics object that it's a free-floating modifier (a Flying Dutchman adverb, James Kirkpatrick called it) that isn't attached to the verb of the sentence but rather describes the speaker's attitude. But floating modifiers are mother's milk to English grammar nobody objects to using "sadly," "mercifully," "thankfully" or "frankly" in exactly the same way.

Or people complain that "hopefully" doesn't specifically indicate who's doing the hoping. But neither does "It is to be hoped that," which is the phrase that critics like Wilson Follett offer as a "natural" substitute. That's what usage fetishism can drive you to you cross out an adverb and replace it with a six-word impersonal passive construction, and you tell yourself you've improved your writing.

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The Word 'Hopefully' Is Here To Stay, Hopefully

By Stephen Glover

PUBLISHED: 18:21 EST, 28 May 2012 | UPDATED: 05:34 EST, 29 May 2012

A stranger to our shores watching Tony Blair at the Leveson Inquiry yesterday would have got the impression of a reasonable and decent man who had unaccountably been abused and mistreated by a his word feral Press.

If I had not lived through the Blair years, and seen the way in which newspapers were manipulated and sometimes lied to by his formidable Press machine, I might have been persuaded by this suave and confident performance.

Much as I admire Lord Justice Leveson and the sardonic Robert Jay, QC, who asks most of the questions, I am afraid that either as a result of ignorance or excessive indulgence, their interrogation of the former prime minister was terribly lame. He was not put on the spot over many issues where he certainly has a case to answer.

Suave: Tony Blair was a confident witness at the Leveson Inquiry, and unlike other witnesses received very soft interrogation

For example, he was not examined as to why he and his turbulent spin doctor Alastair Campbell who has inexplicably been treated with the softest of kid gloves by this inquiry aided and abetted the bid for the Daily Express by the pornographer Richard Desmond in 2000. At that time, the Express was a New Labour-supporting paper, and Mr Blair believed Mr Desmonds assurances hed keep it so.

No questions were put about why he had permitted Mr Campbell to oversee the crucial September 2002 dossier about Iraq, which convinced many people that Saddam Hussein constituted a danger to this country. Equally, he was not required to justify his Press Secretarys fraudulent second dossier partly based unattributably on a long-out-of-date university doctoral thesis published in February 2003.

He was not asked why, in an unprecedented move, he had allowed his spin doctor to give orders to senior civil servants, and was not made to explain why Mr Campbell had connived in the politicisation of the civil service by installing Labour placemen as departmental press officers answerable to him.

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Tony Blair at Leveson Inquiry: Kid gloves and damning questions ex-PM WASN'T asked

Todays guest blogger is Dan Reimold, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Tampa who maintains the student journalism industry blogCollege Media Matters.

Over the past academic year, there has been an explosion of new or renewed campus activities, pop culture phenomena, tech trends, generational shifts, and social movements started by or significantly impacting students.Most can be summed up in a single word.

What did college students do this year? They imitated memes, pinned away, got shmacked and reminded each other, YOLO. (Kevork Djansezian - Getty Images) As someone who monitors student life and student media daily, Ive noticed a small number of words appearing more frequently, prominently or controversially during the past two semesters on campuses nationwide.Some were brand-new.Others were redefined or reached a tipping point of interest or popularity.And still others showed a remarkable staying power, carrying over from semesters and years past.

I've selected 15 as finalists for what I am calling the 2011-2012 College Word of the Year Contest. Okay, a few are actually acronyms or short phrases.But altogether the terms whether short-lived or seemingly permanent offer a unique glimpse at what students participated in, talked about, fretted over, and fought for this past fall and spring.

As Time Magazines Tour confirms, The words we coalesce around as a society say so much about who we are. The language is a mirror that reflects our collective soul."

Let's take a quick look in the collegiate rearview mirror. In alphabetical order, here are my College Word of the Year finalists.

1) Boomerangers: Right after commencement, a growing number of college graduates are heading home, diploma in hand and futures on hold. They are the boomerangers, young 20-somethings who are spending their immediate college afterlife in hometown purgatory.A majority move back into their childhood bedroom due to poor employment or graduate school prospects or to save money so they can soon travel internationally, engage in volunteer work or launch their own business.

Grads at the University of Alabama in 2011. (Butch Dill - Associated Press) A brief homestay has long been an option favored by some fresh graduates, but its recently reemerged in the media as a defining activity of the current student generation.

Graduation means something completely different than it used to 30 years ago, student columnist Madeline Hennings wrote in January for the Collegiate Times at Virginia Tech. At my age, my parents were already engaged, planning their wedding, had jobs, and thinking about starting a family.Today, the economy is still recovering, and more students are moving back in with mom and dad.

2) Drunkorexia: This five-syllable word has become the most publicized new disorder impacting college students. Many students, researchers and health professionals consider it a dangerous phenomenon. Critics, meanwhile, dismiss it as a media-driven faux-trend. And others contend it is nothing more than a fresh label stamped onto an activity that students have been carrying out for years.

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College Word of the Year Contest contenders: Drunkorexia, shmacked and FOMO

"The measure of a man is what he does with power Plato

By all counts, Prime Minister Najib Razak gave a sterling performance when he spoke to the Malaysian community in London a few weeks ago. He said all the right things about democracy and his own commitment to making Malaysia a better country. As the most articulate and erudite prime minister we have ever had, he can be impressive and inspiring.

He said, for example, that what mattered most in a democracy was the choice of the people and agreed that the people should have the choice to choose their own government. He also said his government wants to engage the people, listen to the people and do what is best for them while acknowledging that the era of the government knows best is over.

Its always thrilling to hear a Malaysian prime minister articulate such powerful sentiments, sentiments that speak to our deepest hopes; not surprisingly, many cheered him on.

But what is the meaning of democracy and what is the measure of the man?

Democracy is a much abused word. Political leaders everywhere tend to bend it to their own purpose. And so we have even the North Koreans calling themselves a democratic republic.

Abraham Lincoln said that democracy is government of the people, by the people and for the people. Such a political system is premised upon determining the true will of the people through free and fair elections. As well, it is reflected in a system of governance that is transparent and accountable and that respects the rights and dignity of the people. Such a government is not master of the people but servant.

Is this Najibs vision of democracy?

Do we have a system of free and fair elections? Do we have an elections commission that has integrity and impartiality? Is each vote equally weighted? Are all political parties on a level playing field with fair access to the media and an equal opportunity to present their case to the people? Are there clear checks and balances to ensure political parties do not manipulate the vote through corruption and money politics?

The answer to all these questions can only be a resounding no! This is not the ranting of a few Malaysians living abroad or George Soros junkies or Zionist conspirators; it is the view of the overwhelming majority of the people of Malaysia as a recent Merdeka Centre poll indicates. The poll found that Malaysians have no confidence in the electoral process, with nearly 92% of them wanting to see the electoral rolls cleaned up before the next elections.

Excerpt from:
Najib Razak EXPOSED: The meaning of a word & the measure of a man

Two villages in the Holy land's small Christian community are teaching Aramaic - the language that Jesus spoke - in a bid to keep the ancient language alive.

Efforts to teach and revive the Aramaic language are taking place in the Palestinian village of Beit Jala and in the Arab-Israeli village of Jish, AP reported.

In Beit Jala, a village near Bethlehem, where Jesus was born according to the New Testament, older generations teach the language to the younger members of the community.

Similar efforts have been initiated in the village of Jish, which is nestled in the Galilean hills where Jesus lived and preached and where secondary schools are now teaching children the ancient tongue.

Most of the children are from the Maronite community, a dominant Christian church in neighbouring Lebanon.

Members still chant their liturgy in the Aramic, despite few understanding their meaning, the report added.

In Jish, up to 80 village children now voluntarily study Aramaic for two hours a week.

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"We want to speak the language that Jesus spoke," said Carla Hadad, a 10-year-old resident of Jish, who is an eager learner, according to her teacher, Mona Issa.

"We used to speak it a long time ago," she added, referring to her ancestors.

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The Word of Jesus: Schools in Holy Land Revive Aramaic Language