A friend sent me an email with “regretfully” where he should have put “regrettably”. No big deal. He’s not a native English speaker, and these fine points are tricky.

It did, however, get me thinking of the old debate about “hopefully”. All this trouble, I realized, has been caused simply by the absence in English of the word “hopeably”!

But now we live in an AI world. So I checked and found that regrettably, my neologism is not new. Another index card nipped in the bud. Will any of these notes have value in the end?

[29 June 2026]