sadly (and a bit on hopefully)
Those of us who've relocated from our "home English" acquire many new turns of phrase, and we get used to even more. But for most of us, some phrasings just never sit right. We cringe at them. We resist them. We gripe (oh, how we gripe!) about them. And it's one of those things that I'm writing about today. Followers on Twitter will have heard aspects of this before because oh how we gripe! The object of my gripe? It's not a word. It's a word in a certain context—the word sadly in British newspaper reports like these: A selection of sadly died in UK news reports, from GloWBE Besides sadly died , there's sadly passed away , sadly lost , and so forth. Now, I have a certain sensitivity to death-writing because of my funeral-home upbringing ( as you've seen before ). I have little patience for euphemism and cliché when it comes to talking about the fact that people have died. But the heart of why it bothers me has to do with the tone I expect from new...