Reporting the daily death toll from Covid-19, UK government officials say that some number have “sadly died”. How do they know? Perhaps the victims were instead resigned, or angry, or unconscious. Does the use of “sadly” not bespeak a kitsch sentimentalism at odds with the grim reality?

To be fair, writers have for centuries used “sadly” to mean not only “sorrowfully” but also “regrettably” or “unfortunately”. (It thus has a much longer pedigree than the pedants’ bête noire, “hopefully” to mean “it is to be hoped that”, which dates only from the 1930s.) But the pandemic use of “sadly” is also a subtle way of deflecting blame: these people have died, it says, and that is simply very sad, rather than being a consequence of our own mistakes.

“Sadly” also used to mean gravely or seriously, a description not much in demand for the actions of modern leaders. The old word “sad” itself is cognate with “sated”, and originally meant to have had one’s fill of something, and so thence to be weary or mournful. In this sense at least, when we hear the latest pandemic rhetoric from the government’s communications team, we do so sadly.

• Steven Poole’s A Word for Every Day of the Year is published by Quercus.