![]() Then it would have to be interpreted as 'I am sad that he has died'. First, AmE uses a lot more commas than BrE does, and the lack of commas in He has sadly died also adds to the 'clang' factor for me. While I can see that it is perfectly ok to use sadly in that way, the ambiguity of sadly is very apparent to me when I hear or read the sadly-died statements: for two reasons. (Is that better or worse than being a hypocrite? Since I'm a hypocrite on so many things, I'm going to say it's worse.) I think they're people who just like to parrot things they've heard about linguistic usage without really understanding them. That seems hypocritical, but I don't think they're really hypocrites. The people who complain about hopefully never seem to notice sadly doing what they say an adverb shouldn't do. He sadly died is not intended to convey 'he died while sad', but 'We are sad about him dying'. ![]() Sadly is another case where the adverb is usually used to attribute a feeling to the speaker (or writer) rather than to the subject of the sentence. Having said that, one has to admit that these sentences are ambiguous: you could interpret them with the hopeful or the unfortunate applying to the she. It means that I find it unfortunate that she'll arrive, just as the hopefully in the previous example is describing the mental state of the speaker, rather than the state of the subject of the sentence. I'm not saying that she'll arrive in an unfortunate state or in an unfortunate manner. That's actually a silly thing to claim, because there are so many other adverbs that one could make the same argument about and no one's making that argument or interpreting those adverbs that way. Has to mean that she'll arrive full of hope. There are all sorts of pedants out there who claim that a sentence like Sadly is mere platitude.Īnd then there's another reason why it grates: the old sentential adverb problem. Last month, I read a story about a man being stabbed by a stranger on a train which included the phrase "he was sadly killed". So sadly is off-tone for me in an factual report.īut also I bristle at the sadly because it's such a pathetic word, given the situations it's used to describe. American newspapers are only supposed to take a sides in pieces that are clearly marked as 'opinion'. I can't remember what the story was, but to her the writing clearly indicated that the reported thing was a bad thing (or maybe a good thing). But that's not a newspaper.) I recall my mother objecting "they can't say that!" to a front-page news story when she first visited me in the UK. (I know this sometimes surprises non-Americans because they think of Fox News. AmE) editorialiing.īritish newspapers put their hearts on their sleeves more than American ones do in reporting, not just in terms of expressing sadness at deaths, but in their reporting of everything. I expect a newspaper report to tell me that there was an accident or a murder and someone died. But the heart of why it bothers me has to do with the tone I expect from newspapers, having grown up with American ones (I've also mentioned that before, here). I have little patience for euphemism and cliché when it comes to talking about the fact that people have died. ![]() Now, I have a certain sensitivity to death-writing because of my funeral-home upbringing ( as you've seen before). It's a word in a certain context-the word sadly in British newspaper reports like these:Ī selection of sadly died in UK news reports, from GloWBEīesides sadly died, there's sadly passed away, sadly lost, and so forth. Followers on Twitter will have heard aspects of this before because oh how we gripe! And it's one of those things that I'm writing about today. But for most of us, some phrasings just never sit right. Those of us who've relocated from our "home English" acquire many new turns of phrase, and we get used to even more.
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