Hopefully meaning3/21/2023 ![]() ![]() The 1976 edition of The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage called on reporters and editors to restrict use of hopefully to "in a hopeful manner." To be quite honest, a decade ago I was on the side of the objectors, but in recent years additional thought about the matter has changed my mind. The word is in common use and perhaps in reputable use and one wonders whether attempts to resist it are not exercises in futility.Ī few years later, in Dos, Don'ts & Maybes of English Usage, Bernstein compared hopefully to words like fortunately, luckily, regrettably and happily, saying: In Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins, he wrote prophetically: By 1971, though, even Bernstein had begun to soften his stance. In The Careful Writer (1965), he said hopefully was commonly misused. Criticism of its misuse accelerated just as steadily.Īmong the critics was Theodore Bernstein, assistant managing editor of The New York Times. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage says use of hopefully to mean we hope or it is hoped was rare until the early 1960s, with use accelerating from 1964 on. But you don't get to conflate your idiosyncratic linguistic preferences with the Law and the Prophets.ĭoug Ward, " A 50-year tug of war over ‘hopefully' ends with a shrug" (KUediting, Apr. It appears to be the case than once the tribe of Harrumphers shuffles off to bliss eternal, hopefully will look considerably less catastrophic. ![]() Contact as a verb was scorned by purists in the 1940s and 1950s but is perfectly innocuous today. 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. Vogue usages tend to irritate purists, because they are popular with the Wrong People. Anyone who consults Bryan Garner, the prescriptivist's prescriptivist, will discover that he has been saying for years that the objection to hopefully is a lost cause and that the usage is well established in the language, though he doesn't much care for it himself. Anyone who troubles to look into Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage will discover a page and a half on hopefully, with explanation that it had a pedigree as a sentence adverb before falling out of favor in the 1960s, and that there is no grammatical objection to using it as a sentence adverb. It is melancholy to reflect how many people, some of them entrusted with the instruction of the young, have not taken the trouble to inform their opinions. Everyone who uses it as a singular instead of thou or thee is violating the rules. It is a rule in English, or was, that you is a plural pronoun. In Anglo-Saxon, every noun had gender, and the rabble of illiterate peasants who ignore the rules of grammar dropped that in the creation of Middle English. Language is precisely what its speakers make of it. John McIntyre, " Hopefully, someone might learn something" (Baltimore Sun, Apr. ![]() "We batted this around, as we do a lot of things, and it just seemed like a logical thing to change," says David Minthorn, the deputy standards editor of the Associated Press. Previously, the only accepted meaning was: "In a hopeful manner." As in, " ‘Surely you are joking,' the grammarian said hopefully." "We now support the modern usage of hopefully," the tweet said. Then, on Tuesday morning, the venerated AP Stylebook publicly affirmed ( via tweet, no less) what it had already told the American Copy Editors Society: It, too, had succumbed. 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. They had already taken the Oxford English Dictionary they had stormed the gates of Webster's New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition. The barbarians have done it, finally infiltrated a remaining bastion of order in a linguistic wasteland. Monica Hesse, " AP's approval of ‘hopefully' symbolizes larger debate over language" (Washington Post, Apr. Here is a roundup of some of the online responses to the stylebook change. The big news in the copy editing world this week was the revelation that the Associated Press Stylebook would no longer hold the line against the long-stigmatized use of "hopefully" as a sentence adverb to mean "It is hoped." The announcement elicited some strong reactions both pro and con. ![]()
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