Usefully, language is big enough, old enough and flexible enough to accommodate more than one meaning per word. McIntyre, on his You Don’t Say blog, writes: “Stubbornly, this superstition refuses to go away, and sadly, no amount of explanation suffices to wipe it out.” Mercilessly, I’ve added my two cents. Hopefully is fine – and standard – as a sentence adverb. Arguing that the older meaning is the only legitimate one (see also: decimate) will soon get you in trouble because, as Gabe Doyle points out in his post about hopefully at Motivated Grammar, “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”. Hopefully started out meaning “in a hopeful” manner. This might explain the concurrent surge in objections, but it doesn’t justify them. In the second half of the twentieth century, the occurrence of certain sentence adverbs grew rapidly, according to Robert Burchfield in The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage ( actually and basically are often criticised too). Clearly, it’s a useful feature, one I’ve made use of in this very sentence and elsewhere in this post. Usage Note: 'Hopefully, the senator will vote for the bill. Maybe hopingly or hopeably will come into fashion, but I doubt it.Īdverbs have been used to qualify entire clauses and sentences for centuries. In a hopeful manner: We began our journey hopefully. Regrettably, however, people will be misled about its acceptability if they rely excessively or exclusively on the AP Stylebook. Except in rare instances where ambiguity is possible, no one who hears the popular usage is confused by it. I mentioned hopefully in a previous post about skunked words – though to call it skunked might be overstating matters.
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