Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words - Bill Bryson [37]
holocaust. In Greek the word means “burnt whole,” and generally speaking, it is better reserved for disasters involving fiery destruction. You should not, for instance, use the word to describe the devastation wrought by a hurricane or mudslide. However, a clear exception is in references to the slaughter of Jews by Germany during World War II, when it describes the entire extermination process. In such contexts, the word is normally capitalized.
home, hone. “But Milosevic, ever the master tactician, had honed in on one of the Tribunal’s shakiest stanchions” (New Yorker). Hone means to sharpen (as in honing a knife) or, more rarely, to complain or yearn for. The term for seeking out a target, as in the example, is home.
homely. Occasionally a source of confusion between Britons and Americans. In Britain (and in most of its former dominions), the word means comfortable and appealing, having the warm and familiar qualities associated with a home. In America, for obscure reasons, it has long signified something that is unattractive, particularly in respect to the human face. If the audience is international and confusion is likely to follow, a more neutral term is clearly advised. In any case, to describe someone as homely in the American sense is inescapably subjective and generally uncharitable, and may cause needless hurt.
homonym, homophone. Both describe words that have strong similarities of sound or spelling but different meanings. A homophone is a word that sounds like another but has a different meaning or spelling, or both. A homonym is a word that has a different meaning but the same spelling or sound. Thus blue and blew are both homonyms and homophones. However, bow as in a ship and bow as in a tie are homonyms (because they are spelled the same) but not homophones (because they have different pronunciations). In short, unless the intention is to emphasize the equivalence of pronunciations, homonym is generally the better word.
honorariums, not honoraria, is usually the preferred plural for honorarium.
hopefully. “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.” Seventy or eighty years ago that sentence by Robert Louis Stevenson would have suggested only one interpretation: that it is better to travel filled with hope than to actually reach your destination. Today, however, it could also be read as meaning “to travel is, I hope, better than to arrive.”
This extended sense of hopefully has been condemned with some passion by many authorities, among them Philip Howard, who calls it “ambiguous and obscure, as well as illiterate and ugly.” Many others, notably Bernstein and Gowers, accept it, though usually only grudgingly and often with restrictions attached.
Most of those who object to hopefully in its looser sense do so on the argument that it is a misused modal auxiliary—that is to say, that it fails to modify the elements it should. Take the sentence “Hopefully the sun will come out soon.” As constructed, this sentence suggests (at least to a literal-minded person) that it is the sun whose manner is hopeful, not yours or mine. After all, you would hardly say, “Believably the sun will come out soon” if you believed it might, or “Thinkingly the sun will come out soon” if you thought as much.
The shortcoming of this argument is that those writers who scrupulously avoid hopefully in such constructions do not hesitate to use at least a dozen other words—apparently, presumably, happily, sadly, mercifully, thankfully, and so on—in precisely the same way. In Paradigms Lost, the American critic John Simon roundly disdained the looser hopefully, yet elsewhere he wrote, “Marshall Sahlins, who professes anthropology at the University of Chicago, errs some fifteen times in an admittedly long piece.” That admittedly is every bit as unattached as any hopefully ever was.
To accept the one while excusing the