Feedback e-mailed by Anthony Gonzales (August 16, 2015):
I was bemused by a news item which came out in The Standard last August 11. Although I understand fully well what a sentence in it means, still I wonder whether it can convey the opposite to an unknowing reader. It says that House Representative Ferdinand Martin Romualdez of Leyte lamented that the Yolanda tragedy which hardly hit Tacloban City has yet to feel the rehabilitation effort of the government in full swing.
The word “hardly” here is meant “severely” but it could also be interpreted in its other meaning of “barely” or “only just”, which we all know of course to be untrue. Can it be replaced by another adverb?
My reply to Anthony Gonzales:
The adverb “hardly” indeed has the equivocal sense of (1) “severely,” as in “The criminal took the life sentence imposed on him hardly”; (2) “barely” and “only just,” as in “The campaign against official corruption has hardly scratched the surface of the problem”; and (3) “with difficulty,” as in “The snatcher can hardly walk after being mauled by irate pedestrians.” This obviously makes “hardly” a particularly troublesome word that can make a statement say the opposite of what the writer or writer means, which I think is the case with how The Standard reported House Representative Ferdinand Martin Romualdez’s lament “that the Yolanda tragedy which hardly hit Tacloban City has yet to feel the rehabilitation effort of the government in full swing.” In that construction, “hardly” clearly has the opposite sense of “barely” or “minimally,” which of course makes the statement absurd.
But yes, “hardly” can easily be replaced by another adverb to make that sentence say exactly what it means, and that adverb is “hard,” which means “fiercely” or “in a violent manner,” as in this reconstruction of that reportage by The Standard: “House Representative Ferdinand Martin Romualdez of Leyte lamented that the Yolanda tragedy that hit Tacloban City hard has yet to feel the rehabilitation effort of the government in full swing.”
As you can see, the positioning of “hardly” and “hard” in a sentence, whether as premodifiers or postmodifiers of the action verb, can make a lot of difference in the sense that each of them yields.
