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:
You may be correct about the word “loan” Gabe, but your credibility is damaged by your incorrect use of the word “hopefully”.
The “incorrect” usage he mentions?
(1) Hopefully my phrasing of the question tipped you off that this was a trick.
Now, this commenter was obviously quite polite about it, but I’ve seen others who are quite different. 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. 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):
(2) […] in the late revival a number of persons were hopefully converted in Scituate […]
But then hopefully gained a related usage as the sentential adverb. The OED first notes this usage in 1932, in a pretty high place: the New York Times Book Review. 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. 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. I dismissed that claim as an eccentricity. But then another person said it, and another. I started to think that maybe there was something wrong with hopefully. 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’ve only ever seen two coherent arguments against hopefully as a sentential adverb. One is that hopefully is an adverb, and as we learned in elementary school, adverbs can modify verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs. 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. Except, of course, that it is. Often, and uncontroversially:
(3a) Happily..they intended Neptune, or I know not what Devill. [1614, Purchas, cited in OED]
(3b) Luckily..our speculations are supported by facts. [1762, Kames, cited in OED]
(3c) Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. [1939, Gone with the Wind]
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. (They’re not; don’t bother.) Or maybe you’re going to claim that you don’t like those sentential adverbs either. Whatever. There are still lots more sentential adverbs that are absolutely unambiguous in what they modify and absolutely beyond reproach:
(4) Perhaps it was not me who broke the lamp.
That perhaps is an adverb is confirmed by the Oxford English Dictionary, and it’s clear that perhaps in (4) modifies the whole proposition. (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. Clearly, (note the sentential adverb) this is not a valid argument against sentential adverb hopefully.
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). But this is just as simple-minded an argument as the first. Yes, from its first discovered usage around 1639, all the way up to sometime around 1900, this was the only meaning of hopefully. And then it gained a new meaning. I know, prescriptivists; that’s just another example of the fallacy of common usage. So what if everyone uses hopefully wrong; if everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?
But 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. How much? Well, glass, snack, and naturally for starters; they all started their lives with different meanings from those they are now uncontroversially allowed to have. A discussion of some words like these, and how their meanings have shifted — to show that hopefully isn’t the only one — will be the next post. Hopefully.
[Update 01/28/10: The follow-up post is now posted; check out how glass, of course, snack, naturally, enthusiasm, and quarantine have all changed their meanings over time.]
[Update 05/17/12: Fred Shapiro tracked sentential hopefully back even further, to Cotton Mather in 1702. More on this, plus the AP’s acceptance of it, in a new post.]
18 comments
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January 1, 2010 at 10:09 pm
Vance
(What would it even mean for perhaps to modify only the verb?)
One verb in “It was me who broke the lamp” is the copula. If “perhaps” were to modify that, it would add uncertainty to the identification. I don’t think this analysis is correct, exactly, but I don’t find it incomprehensible.
Here’s a case where I find it impossible to understand the adverb as anything but sentential: “Sadly, termites ate the steps”.
January 2, 2010 at 6:41 pm
masseylinguists
To those who obsess over the ‘original’ meaning of _hopefully_ I would suggest that you ask them about the adverb _enthusiastically_. Derived from Greek ‘to be possessed by a god’, in the 17th century it had a rather negative meaning – ‘a vain confidence in divine favour’ as the OED puts it. This meaning allowed Emerson to write “[e]verywhere the history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm.’ The current meaning, ‘passionately’ also emerged in the 17th century, and i wonder if waning enthusiasm for religious reformation was one of the reasons the ‘passionately’ meaning began to dominate. How will these _hopefullly_ preservers argue that a change in meaning for _enthusiastically_ is acceptable?
January 3, 2010 at 3:31 am
Linguick
Don’t care about this kind of criticism! Best language lovers accept every expression bearing sense…
January 3, 2010 at 4:09 pm
mike
Our friend goofy had an excellent post about those who would look to a word’s etymology for its “real” meaning:
“Knowledge of etymology is completely unnecessary for using a language. What’s necessary is not what words used to mean, but what words mean now. […] Sometimes it is claimed that an earlier meaning of a word is its literal or real meaning, but really all that can be said is that an earlier meaning is an earlier meaning.”
[http://bradshawofthefuture.blogspot.com/2008/11/recently-i-saw-november-theatres-black.html]
January 4, 2010 at 5:10 am
Faldone
Language Log did a study of the use of “hopefully” some time ago. They dug through various corpuses, including spoken, formal and informal and several written genres, again formal and informal, and found only one in which “hopefully” was used as anything other than a sentential adverb; romance fiction.
And, speaking of original meaning, the next time someone gets all hot and bothered by the use of “decimate” to mean anything other than reduction by one-tenth, ask them if they object to the use of “quarantine” to mean something other than a forty-day period.
January 4, 2010 at 11:29 am
Emily Michelle
This is one of those things that I use all the time, but as soon as I’ve said it I tense up and wait for someone to correct me. Thanks for validating my use of hopefully.
January 5, 2010 at 6:38 am
Stan
Thanks Gabe, you’ve saved me the trouble of writing about this! For a usage that has been standard for decades, hopefully as a sentence adverb attracts some mystifying objections — and from sources that ought to know better, such as the AP Stylebook. Little wonder the misinformation continues to spread.
January 6, 2010 at 10:34 pm
LS
That wasn’t a “post,” it was an article. That information was based on a lecture I attended several years ago that was given by a very respected journalism professor with decades of experience on the field. I get letters and links like this one occasionally, but when it comes to this topic, I have to trust a Ph.D with an illustrious resume over a silly blogger who likes to insult others to make himself feel important. Sorry.
January 7, 2010 at 1:18 am
Gabe
LS: I should clarify why I thought that your article was stupid. You write in the first paragraph “Hopefully is an adverb. It’s not a verb as it is most commonly used.” That is completely absurd. I have never, to my knowledge, heard anyone use “hopefully” as a verb, and I have no idea how or why it would be used as a verb. It is certainly not the most common usage of “hopefully”. If you can offer an example of “hopefully” as a verb, from a native speaker of English, and not as a cutesy usage like “The foolish student hopefully-ed the grammarian to his wit’s end,” I will owe and offer you a full apology for my dismissive remark.
Also, while I might be silly, I assure you I do not insult people for my own ego. No amount of insulting anyone will make me feel important, because at the end of the day I’m still just a grad student.
July 23, 2010 at 5:18 pm
Josh
Having studied Linguistics and received my Master’s in ESL, I love what you write about here. This post is a great example. You write in a highly entertaining and intelligent manner. Hopefully, you’ll keep it up.
Would you mind writing about your perspective on “irregardless”?
July 24, 2010 at 12:39 pm
Gabe
Josh: Thanks. I posted some thoughts on “irregardless” last year: https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/irregardless-has-a-posse/
November 30, 2010 at 7:38 pm
preciseedit
Gabe: Thank you for stopping by our blog and posting a comment about “hopefully.” Returning the favor.
I disagree with your stance on this. See my rather lengthy reply here:
http://300daysofbetterwriting.wordpress.com/2010/06/18/hopefully-i-hope/
June 1, 2012 at 11:20 am
The hopefully files « Arnold Zwicky's Blog
[…] Gabe Doyle, Motivated Grammar, 1/1/10: What’s wrong with “hopefully”? (link) […]
January 15, 2013 at 11:39 am
Dan Howard
Is it reasonable in the following two examples from the original post that the adverbs in question modify, respectively, “are” and “was”? That would blur the distinction between regular and sentential adverbs.
Luckily, our speculations are supported by facts.
Perhaps it was not me who broke the lamp.
March 24, 2013 at 10:57 pm
Gregory
You’re so boring. You don’t motive at all.
January 6, 2014 at 12:24 pm
Ronda
Thank you. You have helped me win my debate with my English prof/poet husband. He says I’ve found my soul-mate and should marry you. Hopefully, it won’t come to that.
April 13, 2020 at 4:49 pm
S. Cavaliere
This post shows that adverbs are mostly fluff. For me they signal that the writer is too lazy to find the proper verb (this applies even more to the old school guardians) or the word isn’t working as an adverb but for emphasis or other aspect of language.
To my American ears, “I don’t give a damn!” is much more direct and holds more power than, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” The frankly here is superfluous and I always took that as a way of the writer showing the character signaling his class or rather class pretensions.
As for those who use hopefully and other adverbs the “correct” way, think of a potential borrower at a bank pleading his case for hist creditworthiness. If you have to do that, it’s too late!
Instead of writing ” . . .,”he asked hopefully.’ You’d be better off using, “he pleaded, or he begged.”
March 20, 2021 at 7:14 am
Daniel Williams
Is it possible to hope less than fully?