A.Word.A.Day --trialogue

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Feb 2, 2026

This week’s theme
Words formed in error

This week’s words
trialogue

A Conversation, 1913-16

Art: Vanessa Bell

Previous week’s theme
There’s a word for it

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

A reader wrote:

I was sorry to see that you’ve succumbed to the use of “hopefully” rather than “I hope”. I guess the train has left the station on that one.

Yes, it has. It left a long time ago. About a century, in fact. Trains leave all the time in language and it’s best not to miss them or risk sounding like Dr. Whom.

Consider a nun in church who has hope in her soul. Here are two usages:

The nun prayed hopefully.
(She prayed while hoping for something. Salvation, perhaps.)
Hopefully, the nun prayed.
(We hope she prayed. Instead of scrolling through her Instagram.)

According to purists, only the first usage is valid. To which I say: we all can be hopeful. You can hope. I can hope. The nun can hope. (What she does soapfully has been left as an exercise for the reader. For extra credit, attempt popefully.)

But back to the train. We’re all aboard it, even when we don’t realize it’s moving. If we insisted on speaking “original” English, we’d be speaking Old English which, despite its name is indecipherable to modern ears. You’d need subtitles.

This week we’ll feature five words that were coined in “error”. I put error in quotes because language is a glorious mishmash of mishearings, misinterpretations, false assumptions, and bad math.

If you want purity, better to look into a nun’s soul, not peer into a language.

trialogue

PRONUNCIATION:

(TRY-uh-log)

MEANING:

noun: A discussion in which three parties participate.

ETYMOLOGY:

Formed in English on the model of dialogue. Earliest documented use: 1532.

NOTES:

The word dialogue comes from Greek dia- (across) + -logue (discourse). The prefix has nothing to do with numbers. English speakers mistook dia- for di- (two) and concluded that a dialog involves two participants, so let’s do trialogue with three.

USAGE:

“I believe that the subtext of this trialogue between the Israelites, Moses, and God is that Moses is now being confronted by a new generation.”
Shlomo Riskin; A Rebbe and Not a Rav; Jerusalem Post (Israel); Jun 10, 2011.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Jobs are like going to church: it's nice once or twice a year to sing along and eat something and all that, but unless you really believe there's something holy going on, it gets to be a drag going in every single week. -Thomas Michael Disch, science fiction author and poet (2 Feb 1940-2008)

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