So what if everyone uses hopefully wrong if everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?īut look, if you’re not willing to use a non-original meaning of a word, you’re going to have to excise a substantial portion of your vocabulary. I know, prescriptivists that’s just another example of the fallacy of common usage. Yes, from its first discovered usage around 1639, all the way up to sometime around 1900, this was the only meaning of hopefully. But this is just as simple-minded an argument as the first.
On to the second argument, then, which is that the original meaning of hopefully was “in a manner full of hope”, the meaning intended in (2). Clearly, (note the sentential adverb) this is not a valid argument against sentential adverb hopefully. (What would it even mean for perhaps to modify only the verb?) So it’s not that sentential adverbs don’t exist, nor is it that they are considered uniformly bad in any variety of English I have ever encountered. That perhaps is an adverb is confirmed by the Oxford English Dictionary, and it’s clear that perhaps in (4) modifies the whole proposition. (4) Perhaps it was not me who broke the lamp. There are still lots more sentential adverbs that are absolutely unambiguous in what they modify and absolutely beyond reproach: (They’re not don’t bother.) Or maybe you’re going to claim that you don’t like those sentential adverbs either. Now let’s say that you want to be completely absurd and try to argue that these adverbs somehow are modifying the verbs intended, supported, and give. (3c) Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. (3b) Luckily.our speculations are supported by facts. (3a) Happily.they intended Neptune, or I know not what Devill. A sentential adverb is asked to modify a sentence - instead of modifying the verb, it modifies the entire proposition - and that, we’re told, just isn’t done.
One is that hopefully is an adverb, and as we learned in elementary school, adverbs can modify verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs. I’ve only ever seen two coherent arguments against hopefully as a sentential adverb. Then still more people complained about it, in really stupid posts about hopefully, and I realized that there couldn’t be anything wrong with it. I started to think that maybe there was something wrong with hopefully. But then another person said it, and another. I dismissed that claim as an eccentricity. Which is why it struck me as a little strange when someone first insisted to me that hopefully couldn’t be used in the only way I naturally used it. And, interestingly enough, this newer meaning has pretty well replaced the original meaning, so much so that many people my age (myself included) do not have the original meaning available in our lexicons.
The OED first notes this usage in 1932, in a pretty high place: the New York Times Book Review. (2) in the late revival a number of persons were hopefully converted in Scituate īut then hopefully gained a related usage as the sentential adverb. This argument, as far as I can tell, runs as follows: hopefully started its life as an adverb meaning “in a hopeful manner”, and that’s how it was used up until the early 20th century, as in (2): They see a usage like (1), of hopefully as a sentential adverb meaning something between “I hope” and “With luck”, and then they start a tirade about how that’s not what hopefully means, about the sad state of grammar in our modern world, and on and on. Now, this commenter was obviously quite polite about it, but I’ve seen others who are quite different. (1) Hopefully my phrasing of the question tipped you off that this was a trick. You may be correct about the word “loan” Gabe, but your credibility is damaged by your incorrect use of the word “hopefully”. Good gravy, why are there so many misguided souls up in arms over this innocent little word? I received a comment about it recently: