Hopey yours service11/23/2023 (Or: Things I learned as a field biologist.) Corpus of Contemporary American Englishģ85 million words of contemporary American English texts, searchable for finding frequency, collocations, syntactic roles, etc.Ī lexicon of fringe English, focusing on slang, jargon, and new words.Ī compendium of knowledge gleaned from seemingly endless scholarly pursuits in the wild.My dad’s newspaper column, about wonderful people and thingsĮxplore the etymology and symbolism of the constellations One of the best lingustic minds out there blogging.Ī blog about the arts, books, flora and fauna, vittles, and whatever comes to mind. Terms and conditions: by reading this blog you accept that all opinions expressed herein will henceforth be your opinions. ![]() ![]() Permanently angry about the abuse of English, maths and logic. Patrick Neylan, Eeditor of business reports. Michael Quinion’s site based on his book Ologies and Isms. Affixes: the building blocks of English.What this is: 1 photo + 1 word x 366 days. Can’t you feel it?ĭoesn’t everyone want to feel hopey? If we can find a reason to? And it has shown up in a few other places. But it does exist as a word! You can find it on Urban Dictionary (I mean, yeah, you can find a lot of completely fake words there too, but…). Maybe just weakened: “I wasn’t entirely hopeful… just hopey.” But that doesn’t contradict the more general sense.ĭon’t bother pulling out (or surfing to) a dictionary to check what it says you won’t find hopey in most of them. There is the risk of hopey leaning the same way, but don’t forget that truth is something that is conceived as externally verifiable, whereas hope is an internal state, and it’s harder to say how it would be faked. Of course, we know the distinction between truthful and truthy. But any time you’re in a mood that’s the opposite of dreading or worrying… There was a lot of that when Barack Obama first took office, for instance (especially thanks to his famous HOPE poster). You feel good about how things are going. Hopey is more of… a mood, a general disposition. Hopeful is a clear future-oriented state: you have an expectation, or at least a sense of probability, that some particular desire will be fulfilled. Heck, the rhyme with dopey and the echo of happy give hopey a distinct tone right away. But there’s always somelittle difference between words, even if just a subtle one of tone or form.ĭon’t tell me you can’t sense a difference between hopeful and hopey. I mean, some languages get by with a spare, konmari-style vocabulary, while English gets by with a vocabulary that is as restrained, elegant, and tidy as the mansion of a millionaire kleptomaniac hoarder. Frankly, they’re used in overlapping ways as it is.īut why do you have so many different mugs in your cupboard? Why so many spoons of different designs in your drawer? Why so many functionally fungible belts or ties or scarves in your wardrobe? Why do I have both a chef’s knife and a carving knife, why do I have wine glasses of at least eight different shapes, why do I have almost a dozen 50mm lenses that can go on the same camera? Why do we have both cheerful and cheery? Why both lustful and lusty? Why both masterful and masterly?Īnd why both bountiful and bounteous, both joyful and joyous, both dutiful and duteous, both deceitful and deceptive, both lawful and legal? Each of these pairs of words could be covered by one word with a wider ambit of sense. In a way, the combination of reviving good feelings from 2008 and spotlighting Palin-like bogeymen who scare independent voters is a decent snapshot of the Democrats’ 2012 strategy at this point.This word looks like it is to hope as dopey is to dope, or as happy is to hap (which, if you’re not sure, is roughly synonymous with luck), or as snippy is to snip, or as jumpy is to jump.īut wait! We have a word hopeful. ![]() But I tell you what, you travel around the country and talk to the American people, that spirit’s still there.” “Over the past 2 and a half years,” he said, “the hope poster starts fading. When I was in Grant Park that night, I warned everybody this was going to be hard, this wasn’t the end it was the beginning.” “All that hopey changey stuff, as they say? That was real. Obama’s belated response went like this, according to last night’s pool report from the Gotham Theater: ![]() At a tea party convention in Nasvhille last year, Sarah Palin said she wanted to ask Obama’s supporters: “How’s that hopey changey thing working out for ya?” The “hopey changey” term comes from a certain former Alaska governor and 2008-vintage Obama opponent.
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