Pritish told me yesterday that, when he posted on a Google Group, he got this message
“Your message will appear in SymphonyxIITB momentarily.”
My (and Pritish’s, I presume, from his responses) first instinct was this was obviously wrong. In my idiolect, _momentarily_ could only be used for the sense _‘for a moment’_ whereas Google was using it for ‘in a moment’. Google is not averse to relatively weird constructions as was discussed in this post on LanguageLog, so I presumed this was the case here too. The biggest mistake prescriptivists make is considering their own intuition or preference as gospel truth. A typical _Grammar Nazi_ or self-appointed language guardian who had the same interpretation of _momentarily_ as mine would have dismissed Google’s usage of momentarily as wrong (people often criticize constructions they consider Indian English, unaware that similar constructions are part of prestige dialects across the world). But this is Linguistrix, and you obviously expect more responsible behaviour here, so I did what anyone should do in situations like these—swallowed my _instinct _and consulted the Merriam Websters Dictionary of English Usage (that I recommended here and referred to here). One look at the MWDEU, which has a rather long entry for momentarily, was enough to tell me I was wrong. Here’s an excerpt, but I will suggest you read the whole entry.
I still feel that the usage of _momentarily_ in India is almost exclusively for the ’for a moment’ sense. I used Google to search for this word on the Times of India, Hindustan Times and Hindu websites, and checked the first few pages of search results. All sentences used it to mean ‘for a moment’. I don’t have more time this morning (what with a formidable to-do list), so I will leave this here. If any of you is interested, try searching a bit more and post your findings in the comment section.
New day, new things learnt. Thanks Pritish!
P.S. If you come across interesting language related stuff, please send it across to username antariksh at the domain linguistrix.com!
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