Thread: Hopefully, Ron won't be too shocked...

Hopefully is now IN as a sentential adverb, Crikey breathlessly reports. Purists are shocked at the decline of civilization. Does anyone else care? Probably not.

Hopefully – Not the end of the world

April 23, 2012 – 6:31 pm, by Aidan Wilson
2
Aidan Wilson writes:

According to popular belief, the world will end on December 20 this year as predicted by the ancient Mayans and their infamous calendar. Like most people, I laughed it off. That, however, was before I realised that the cataclysmic destruction of civilisation is certain, and it will have been brought about by the Associated Press suddenly allowing sentence-modifying hopefully – or at least that’s what several journalists, bloggers, language enthusiasts and self-proclaimed grammarians will have you believe.
AP Stylebook announced last week on Twitter that they would allow hopefully as a sentential adverb, in addition to it being a manner adverb.

Hopefully, you will appreciate this style update, announced at #aces2012. We now support the modern usage of hopefully: it’s hoped, we hope.

David Minthorn from AP Stylebook, defended the decision, pointing out that ‘it just seemed like a logical thing to change – you can’t fight it’. And nor should you, I say.
If you’re not aware of the prohibition against hopefully as a sentential modifier, it is one of the more common gripes that grammarians get hot under the collar over. It’s up there with split infinitives, overuse of the passive, and prepositions at the end of sentences. And much like all the other common gripes, it is largely baseless, yet with all the hysteria and hyperbole being bandied about, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was akin to infanticide or something. Here is the first paragraph of Monica Hesse’s Washington Post opinion piece last week:

The barbarians have done it, finally infiltrated a remaining bastion of order in a linguistic wasteland. They had already taken the Oxford English Dictionary; they had stormed the gates of Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition. They had pummeled American Heritage into submission, though she fought valiantly — she continues to fight! — by including a cautionary italics phrase, “usage problem,” next to the heretical definition.

Barbarians, linguistic wasteland, storming the gates. Goodness! I didn’t realise we were in War of the Words, nor did I realise that the Oxford English Dictionary had gone anywhere. Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote a piece for The Salon, very cleverly titled The audacity of “hopefully”, in which she warns of a slippery slope towards the acceptance of other ‘ungrammatical’ usage:

The AP Stylebook can’t fight it? The AP Stylebook? What hope is there, then? First they came for “hopefully” and we said nothing. Who will stand up when they come for “literally”? Who will speak out when someone writes the next “between you and I”? When modifiers dangle, who will smack them back into place?

Let’s just take a few much needed steps back and look at this controversy from the beginning. Take a completely unremarkable sentence like the one below.

Hopefully she’ll be here soon.

According to the purists, this should mean that the lady will herself be hopeful when she arrives. This can be paraphrased as in a hopeful manner. The more natural interpretation in my opinion, is that the speaker is saying that he or she hopes that the lady will arrive soon, and doing it in such a way as to imply that everybody shares his or her hope. This interpretation can be paraphrased as it is to be hoped that.
There are a couple of odd things about this gripe. The most intriguing is that it doesn’t extend to other sentential adverbs, of which there are a plethora in English: thankfully, surely, regrettably, frankly and ironically are just a few examples, but you could come up with dozens more. These sentential adverbs don’t appear to cause any problems and are used by everyone very frequently, but their structure directly parallels that of hopefully and the semantics are very similar. So why is it that surely she’ll be here soon is acceptable, while hopefully she’ll be here soon is a harbinger of the apocalypse?
Unlike with other gripes, such as the split infinitive and overuse of passives which have been a part of English since before there even was an English, there was once a time when you couldn’t use hopefully as a sentential modifier; it is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Hopefully as an adverb of manner goes right back to the 16th century, but the earliest confirmed published use of it as a sentential adverb, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (which – I’m relieved to report to Monica Hesse – hasn’t been taken anywhere), was in 1932 in a New York Times book review, although there would certainly have been earlier unpublished examples:

He would create an expert commission‥to consist of ex-Presidents and a selected list of ex-Governors, hopefully not including Pa and Ma Ferguson.

This is evidence of English evolving over time; what was novel 80 years ago is commonplace today. In that respect at least this gripe is potentially a legitimate one; some purists may well remember a time when hopefully could only mean in a hopeful manner, and could therefore argue that the sentential adverb use is not grammatical to them, but I very much doubt that any native English speaker today cannot parse a sentence such as the New York Times example above.
John McIntyre from the Baltimore Sun, whom AP has credited with ‘prodding them into action’, fires back against these loonies, arguing that it, and other detested constructions, have become a sort of modern shibboleth, separating us from the ‘Wrong People’, you know who they are, they talk differently to us (or should that be from us?):

Here’s what it comes down to. Vogue usages tend to irritate purists, because they are popular with the Wrong People. Vogue usages tend to fade away as the Wrong People are drawn to some shiny new thing, but some of them lodge in the language. Contact as a verb was scorned by purists in the 1940s and 1950s but is perfectly innocuous today. It appears to be the case than once the tribe of Harrumphers shuffles off to bliss eternal, hopefully will look considerably less catastrophic.

Languages change. It isn’t the end of the world.
I realise the image of the Mayan Calendar has nothing to do with this post at all apart from a very thin segue, but I couldn’t find a useful image that involved ‘hopefully’.

Hopefully, it will stop raining here before next weekend so I can take the back way up Mount Tamborine.