First off, if you haven’t already heard, the AP Stylebook finally dropped its objection to sentential hopefully (i.e., the “it is hoped” meaning), thanks in no small part to John McIntyre’s agitation. Another shibboleth bites the dust, hooray.
If you’re harboring any doubt about the wisdom of this move, cast it to sea. Living with sentential hopefully isn’t giving into modern ignorance; it’s giving in to traditional usage. Emily Brewster points out this 1999 article from Fred Shapiro in American Speech. Smack on its first page, we’re given a quote from Cotton Mather in 1702:
“Chronical Diseases, which evidently threaten his Life, might hopefully be relieved by his removal.”
In previous work, Shapiro traced it back to 1851, and here’s an example I found in Google Books from 1813. So it’s not some new and insidious usage, though this is often claimed.
And it’s not like sentential adverbs are inherently bad, either; witness well-regarded members of our lexicon such as frankly, happily, thankfully, or luckily, each of which can be used at the start of a sentence with nary an eyelash batting. The truth is that accepting sentential hopefully is not giving in to a tide of misusage but rectifying an objection that should never have been raised.
Mary Elizabeth Williams doesn’t see it that way. In a piece at Salon, she views the AP’s leniency on hopefully as capitulation. She thinks the AP’s giving in to the uneducated masses instead of remaining the guiding and educating light it ought to be. It’s another sign that no one knows about language anymore, and no one cares about it, not even its presumed defenders. She closes with this regret:
“Language keeps evolving, and that’s fine and natural. Yet as it does, I’ll still gaze hopefully toward a world in which we battle over our words and our rules because we know them so well, and love them so much.”
Hey, you and me both. But here’s the thing: it’s not just everyone else who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Williams needs some work to get into her own dream world as well. While she lectures us who see nothing wrong with sentential hopefully about how we ought to have a better language arts education, she explains her disgust with it by exasperatedly pointing out:
“‘Hopefully’ is an adverb. An adverb, I tells ya […]”
Ok, cool, but I’m with the red-headed guy here:
She’s really stressing the hopefully-is-an-adverb point, which is fine, but no one’s saying it’s not. The sentential usage is an adverbial usage. If you think that people think that hopefully can be used in a non-adverbial context, then you’re not in a position to be disparaging anyone’s knowledge of English.
So it’s strange that Williams is complaining about people who don’t know enough about English causing the acceptance of sentential hopefully, since the people opposing sentential hopefully apparently don’t know English either. A person who really knew about the history of usage in English would know that sentential hopefully is a member of a large and grammatical class of sentential adverbs, that it’s been around for centuries, that, in short, there’s nothing wrong with it. It engenders some distaste from the uninformed and it’s perhaps a bit informal, but there’s no reason why it should be so despised. Many of the people who condemn the rabble for not knowing the rules or history of English don’t know them themselves.
Let me cast the mote out of my own eye first: I don’t either. I was gobsmacked by the Brewster/Shapiro/Mather finding; in an earlier post talking about sentential hopefully, I only had it going back to 1932. There is a lot that any one person won’t know about a language. But one key difference between people who claim to care about how language works and those who actually do is that the latter category will investigate a usage before accusing it of being bad grammar.
So yes, it’s a shame that so many people don’t care about language. But the problem isn’t that alone; it’s also that too many who do care about language care about it wrong. They’re not interested in the actual data; they’re interested in what they decided the language ought to be. They argue their points in a world apart from actual usage, based on the logic that they presume underlies language. When they do cite usage, it’s with a heavy confirmation bias. And their complaints are run through with this strange — and to me, infuriating — willingness to grant themselves pardons from their otherwise zero-tolerance policy. Williams groans at people who use nauseous for “nauseated” (standard since the 19th century, BTW) or who write gonna, but then gladly admits that she uses stabby and rapey*.
This isn’t caring about language; it’s caring about feeling superior.
—
*: Which, by the way, seriously?
Motivated Grammar 
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May 17, 2012 at 3:22 pm
Keri Peardon
While I won’t excuse true butchering of the English language, I get annoyed with people who try, so forcefully, to keep the language from evolving. Living languages change to match the needs of the culture which uses them. If you want words and grammar that never change, study Latin.
But your post reminds me of something I was discussing with another blogger yesterday, about how there are so many “rules” when it comes to writing, and some are rather ridiculous. For instance, he was told that you couldn’t have “throw away body parts.” Because eyes can’t actually roll, and hands can’t actually be thrown into the air (unless they’re severed), you are not supposed to use those phrases in your writing. To which I responded, “then what is my teenager doing when she looks skyward to show her disdain for her parental units?”
Who makes up these rules, anyways? It’s like “ain’t.” That was a perfectly acceptable word in the 17th and 18th century–Shakespeare used it, as did Colonial newspapers. Who decided it was no longer a valid word?
May 17, 2012 at 3:41 pm
the ridger
There is very little more obnoxious than people who (pretend they) don’t understand simple metaphors.
May 17, 2012 at 3:47 pm
Emily
“They argue their points in a world apart from actual usage, based on the logic that they presume underlies language.” That very nicely sums up prescriptivism right there. And you’re right, it was infuriating to read that article where she lists all her writing quirks and then insists “But THIS one is horrible!” You can’t have it both ways, ma’am.
May 17, 2012 at 5:19 pm
Ray Girvan
> I only had it going back to 1932
And as you said, that’s from the OED (that’s still the earliest citation in the latest online version). I guess you can’t blame them – before the big online corpuses existed, tracking these things back was far more laborious. But this an example where revision is long overdue, because the citation date is aiding the myth that sentential “hopefully” is recent.
May 17, 2012 at 6:48 pm
John Cowan
It took me a long time to realize that removal meant ‘departure’ rather than ‘death’ in that quotation. Sure, it cures your chronic diseases to die, but ….
May 18, 2012 at 4:10 am
Purvis
Sophistry.
May 18, 2012 at 4:37 am
Stan
A measure of humility goes a long way, but it’s probably not high on the list of traits sought in prospective opinion columnists.
May 18, 2012 at 5:04 am
Eugene
A legitimate issue in these discussions is the fact that languages do, in fact, change over time. However, in most of these debates about prescriptive issues, it turns out that we are not actually talking about recent developments and whether or not they are acceptable.
Time and time again it turns out that these usages are very old and somewhat well established. More often than not Shakespeare and a dozen other great writers have since used the word or construction in question.
I think the issue is often variation. There are a tremendous variety of constructions in the various dialects of the language at any given time. That’s the genius and creativity of the language.
The words and constructions that aren’t frequent in my particular dialect don’t automatically deserve condemnation. In fact, they deserve at least respectful consideration for how they convey what they mean.
Or, failing that, commentators could at least consult a good usage guide, preferably Merriam Websters Dictionary of English Usage. You would not make a public fool of yourself, as Mary Elizabeth Williams did, if you had read the MWDEU entry first.
May 18, 2012 at 7:33 am
Marc Leavitt
Prescriptivism, schmecriptism!
May 18, 2012 at 7:34 am
Marc Leavitt
Sorry. That should be “schmecriptivism.
May 18, 2012 at 8:17 am
===Dan
I think ignorance abounds all over the place. People who display their ignorance may have the good intentions of sharing what they (believe they) know. Sharing ignorance provides the opportunity to improve knowledge, so it shouldn’t be discouraged. Unfortunately, the desire to “feel superior” is ubiquitous in all sorts of social settings, too, and this might sometimes work against the opportunity to improve knowledge.
So please let me expose my own ignorance and help me understand a related issue that I’ve been thinking about lately. (I’m not directing this at this blog or anyone in particular…) I can understand the concept of objective and non-judgmental study of how the language is actually used (and by whom), without regard to reasons and justifications, or someone’s idea of what it “should” be. If a phrase or usage evokes a strong negative reaction (by an educated group of significant size, even if not well-informed), whether or not the reason is justifiable by the facts, isn’t that still part of how we use language, what language conveys? Doesn’t taking _any_ side in a debate about whether or not some usage “should” be eschewed seem antithetical to “descriptive” study?
If someone provides a rationale that is simply incorrect, I’m not suggesting that the argument should not be refuted. But maybe it would be consistent with description (at least how the word resonates with me) if beliefs about what is (or isn’t) appropriate language were to be observed and described objectively–without regard to the reasons given–in much the same way one might observe how formerly non-standard usages come to be accepted. I do see some objective description of prescriptivist views (say in some dictionary usage notes), but I also see plenty of attempts to debunk these views, to take sides, to criticize opinions (and people who express them) about how language should be written or spoken.
Am I off-base here?
May 18, 2012 at 9:08 am
Daniel
===Dan, I would recommend checking out https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/can-descriptivism-and-prescriptivism-coexist/
May 18, 2012 at 10:21 am
===Dan
Thanks, Daniel! It was an interesting post, as were some of the other threads mentioned in the post and comments. But I don’t think I came across explicit discussion of the specific issue I raised. I think my views come closest to something in Jonathon Owens’s cited post: “prescriptivism is a metalinguistic phenomenon that at the very least is worthy of more serious study.” My point was that attempting to counter even the (so-called) unreasonable and extreme versions of prescriptivist thought seemed to be, by definition, non-descriptive.
I think it’s OK to step outside of descriptivism to justify its practice, but perhaps “the only winning move is not to play.”
May 18, 2012 at 8:52 pm
Daniel
===Dan, whether it is inherently antithetical to descriptivism to take any side in a debate about whether some usage “should” be eschewed would depend on just what you mean by descriptivism. (Please forgive me for sounding like a lawyer in that sentence.) If you see descriptivism as non-judgmental in contrast to prescriptivism being judgmental, then it may indeed seem that way. But in fact descriptivism is quite capable of judgment. Descriptivism will say, point blank, that the following English sentences are wrong:
*I the ball caught (English is SVO, not SOV)
*I are catching the ball (subject and verb violate number agreement rules)
*I caught the ball red (adjectives should precede the noun in English)
The difference between prescriptivism and descriptivism is not that one is judgmental and the other is not. The difference is in what standards they use in making judgments. Prescriptivism can involve a mishmash of incoherent standards: disdain of ambiguity, desire for an internal “logic”, desire to emulate the grammar of other languages, dislike of particular phrases for reasons ranging from overuse to how they sound to who knows what else, et cetera. Descriptivism, on the other hand, uses (or at least aspires to use) only one standard: how people naturally speak and write. This does allow for a lot of ambiguity (in my dialect the positive anymore is incorrect; as I recall, it is correct in Gabe’s dialect), which in turn does lead to softer judgments in many key areas. But judgments are nonetheless still being made.
I think part of the assumption that descriptivism is nonjudgmental comes from the fact that the term is most often used in situations where prescriptivists and descriptivists disagree (there is, after all, little point in discussing at length the fact that people in both groups will say that “I caught ball the” is wrong and “I caught the ball” is right), and in most situations where they disagree, descriptivism is taking he more permissive stance. Given this, it’s easy to see how people can get the idea that descriptivism does not make pronouncements regarding what is right and what is wrong. However, descriptivism does do exactly that, just in a way quite different from how prescriptivism does it.
May 18, 2012 at 10:04 pm
===Dan
Thanks, Daniel. You’ve improved my understanding of the issues. I don’t want to take over this thread, but please bear with me for one more round.
I think I’m focusing on something that I haven’t seen in your reply. That is, there’s something in common between “how people naturally speak and write” and how people talk about the “rules” they believe have been hammered into their brains, and how certain these readers or listeners react to perceived violations. The automatic negative reaction for these listeners/readers to certain kinds of language, it seems to me, is part and parcel with the way they naturally speak and write: it comes with the language they’ve learned. As such, I was thinking that one could study the beliefs about “rules” in a manner that parallels the way speech patterns are studied.
There’s no shortage of exposition of those rules (by prescriptivists), so the perceived rules are almost as observable as the speech/writing patterns themselves. And to describe how (some) people respond to language seems to add more information than limiting the study to how people speak and write. (After all, the act of listening or reading is separate from the act of speaking or writing, and yet all of the above are equally important for communication.)
If you judge a particular usage in terms of how people naturally speak and write, it seems you don’t judge based on the rationales for those usages. (It doesn’t matter that I say “pea” because somebody once thought “pease” really was a plural word “peas.”) The parallel I was trying to draw was that the erroneous rationales given by prescriptivists could be equally irrelevant, and the cries of pain from prescriptivists are language-related events just as are speech and writing. Does this make sense? Am I right that they aren’t always treated the same way?
Thanks for your patience with all this. I’ve enjoyed it.
May 21, 2012 at 9:24 am
Jenny
===Dan, I think you make an interesting point. The thing about these rules, though, is that they describe a theoretical version of English, which leads, often, to variation rather than standardization. Hypercorrection just to name one type of variation. Take the word “whom” for instance (I’m not sure if prescriptivists still push for whom), which is practically a dead word in modern usage: even when employed it winds up being used wrong because people don’t understand what it “should” be used for. People wind up using it in any application in which they want to sound a bit formal or educated, often making them more ripe for more criticism by prescriptivists than if they’d just used “who”.
I don’t think any descriptivist would try to argue (although I hate to overstep with my assumption) that there are conventions that are perhaps more or less acceptable in different contexts: casual conversation v. an oral presentation; an email to a friend v. academic writing (just to name a few); nor would they (I dare say) argue that the “rules of grammar” don’t have their place in guiding new writers learning how to make themselves understood; nor would they argue (I’d say) that the rules don’t influence the way we use language. What is relevant, I think, is:
1. The influence prescriptivists have is not, in many cases, the influence they wish to have (see above).
2. The conventions of speech and writing have their own appropriate settings, and speakers are intuitively aware of when to employ them, and that goes both ways: If you went around talking to your friends as though giving a presentation, or if you talked to your bar buddies the way you talk to your boss, or a professor, in most cases, you would be mis-using language. So, arguing whether “standard english” or “prescriptivist english” has a proper context or influence is not really the point so much as the fact that other forms are valid, too, and “the standard” is certainly not the all-out, immutable, universal rule of the language. In fact an all out universal rule can’t be applied to a living language at all.
It’s certainly correct to say that the “rules of grammar” have far reaching influence on the way we speak, so certainly its effects are observable in study. However, that’s not studying a standard prescriptivist version of English. It’s studying the effects of that perceived correctness.
Not to mention, though a little off subject of your conversation, with an example like the “adverb” comment in the original post, it bears mention that since prescriptivist grammar is a largely theoretical version of English which even the most staunch advocates can’t/don’t universally apply, you open yourself up to sharp criticisms such as these because you’re bound to show elements of hypocrisy and nonconformance, while insisting that those should not exist.
May 21, 2012 at 10:01 am
===Dan
Thanks, Jenny! (I’ve exceeded my quota of nested replies!) I agree fully with just about everything you said. I never meant that the suggestions of prescriptivists should be heeded in the context they intend– that the rules they assert should apply to anybody else, or that they are providing useful information about the language in general. I don’t recommend studying a standard prescriptivist version of English.
As such, I agree with point 1 but I see it as not germane to my suggestion, and the possibility of hypocrisy may be even more valuable in the study of mental models (again, a very lose term) of language. Prescriptivists may speak in terms of imperatives, but what they’re also doing is revealing something more about language than you can learn just by analyzing speech and writing. Maybe you get a glimpse of internal censorship. Again, I’m not suggesting that you should let them lecture you, but rather that you may be able to infer things about how language works by observing what they react to, how strongly they react to it, and under what circumstances. (Maybe everybody has these internal censors, enforcing personal “rules,” but they become visible for a small set of people.) These are observable events that capture information not found in writing and speech.
If you put prescriptivists under a microscope, there may not need to be any need to debate them (a futile exercise, in any event).
Thanks, everybody, for the pleasant and interesting exchanges!
June 1, 2012 at 11:21 am
The hopefully files « Arnold Zwicky's Blog
[…] *Gabe Doyle, Motivated Grammar, 5/17/12: Can we all admit none of us know what we’re talking about? (link) […]
July 19, 2012 at 4:42 pm
Ann Nash
Ahhh–someone finally lit a match in a very dark tunnel–now we can see who’s who. I’ve long believed that those who love to rail and froth—looking down their snooty little noses at anyone so stupid, and so ignorant, as to violate the sanctity of the high-and-holy language by making some slight misstep (not a sin, no sin, folks) of “accepted” grammar and usage in speaking or writing–are nothing but bullies behind their masks of intellectual superiority and class.
I can guarantee them the English language will survive (and no doubt flourish, thank you very much), without their rigid, heavy-handed protection. Our language’s no princess pining away in some high tower, so delicate, pure, and chaste, she dare not mingle among the dirty masses below. Hell, no! The woman never had any virtue to sully; never met a stable-boy not deserving a good roll in the musty hay. And she had a boatload of beautiful bastard kids– and ir’s because of them (and not a bunch of prissy, mean-spirited bullies)–and their rowdy wild descendants, that our language is as rich, as strange, and as gloriously crazy-headed, loose-jointed, and alive, as it is today.
So, thanks–love your work.
MagpieAnnie
April 27, 2014 at 3:11 am
Richard
What the hell’s wrong with “hopefully…” as in “Hopefully, my car will start.” It’s short for “Speaking hopefully (if not completely confidently or even accurately), my car will start”. Just like “Honestly, that’s enough,” is short for “Speaking honestly, that’s enough.” Why wouldn’t a person say instead, “(Speaking) hopefully, I hope my car will start?” Because that would be redundant. Besides, in that case, you can be quite sure of yourself: “Honestly, (and with absolute conviction, I declare:) I hope my car will start.” Why waste so many words? It’s easier to say the same thing with “Hopefully, my car will start. Now, are you allowed to drop the comma, or would that be pushing it?