Stan Dubinsky brings to my attention this attempt by a grammarian to defend ordinary folks’ most common use of “hopefully” as something less than a mortal sin. It’s a dense piece, for something so short, but here are some relevant bits:
Many adverbs are used as manner adjuncts: He saw her clearly uses clearly as a modifier specifying the manner of the seeing. Some are used as what The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language calls modal adjuncts, necessarily and possiblybeing the most basic and familiar ones. Clearly happens to have both a manner use and a modal use: Clearly he saw her is an example of the latter (modal adjuncts are often placed at the beginning of the clause; notice that this sentence doesn’t comment on the clarity of the glimpse, it says that given the evidence it’s indubitable that he saw her)…
With truly extreme caution, the AP Style Guide nonetheless waited a decent further interval: Its editors let more than a quarter of a century go by before they finally risked accepting what had now been normal Standard English usage for a lifetime. On April 17, 2012, they announced correctly that the modal-adjunct use of hopefully is not a grammatical error.
And people acted as if the sky was falling. “The barbarians have done it, finally infiltrated a remaining bastion of order in a linguistic wasteland,” wrote an overheated (and since then, overquoted) Monica Hesse in The Washington Post on April 18. (Perhaps she wrote ironically, but it doesn’t look like it.)
Barbarians? A single additional use of a single adverb undergoes a tiny expansion in its uses, fully in line with normal developments in the history of English syntax. No threat of ambiguity arises (I have never seen a case in which it was in doubt whether hopefullywas intended as a manner adjunct or a modal adjunct). And when AP makes a small move, decades late, toward acceptance of an easily accessible fact about how English speakers employ a word, it means our language is being reduced to a “wasteland”?
The author, Geoffrey Pullum, blames the late usage specialist Wilson Follett for inspiring “Five Decades of Foolishness” over the common usage.
I’ve always been able to see that the use of “hopefully” was structurally problematic, but I’ve also known that it communicates clearly and concisely. Which is generally seen as a virtue.
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Thankfully this subject has not reared it’s ugly head too often. Ok, that’s probably passive. And Ok is probably not correct. Nor should we begin a sentence with And. Hopefully the grammar police aren’t watching too closely. Or is that too close. aaaaaaahhhhh! Should aaaaaaaahhhhh be in upper case?
Lawyers, and even the multitude of TV actors now portraying these models of court-approved language, have been the longstanding champions of “clearly”‘s modal adjunct. Example:
“Whether a client is entitled to a refund of fees when the lawyer-client relationship ends depends upon whether the fee paid by the client in advance is clearly excessive under the circumstances, not the terminology used by the lawyer to describe the fee.” – Ethics Opinion Articles – Carmen K. Hoyme, NC State Bar Journal
As usual, however, said role models clearly escape any responsibility as academics point their fingers at people not as qualified for public office … the dumb “barbarians”. Hmmm!
Even to the grammatical elite these concerns are a little unique, don’t you think?
How far down your pile of topics did you have to go to find this piece? I realize this is a slow time politically, but damn…
um, bud–“its” is the possessive pronoun; “it’s” means “it is.”
This is a pedantic grammar post, after all….
@Juan–Wow.
Your logic is stunning.
On another post, Kathryn calls on us to use the phrase “beg the question” correctly.
Which reminds me…
See how I used “problematic” above? I used it the way most folks do. But I seem to very vaguely remember from school that that sense is incorrect — that “problematic” actually refers to a more complex concept that simply saying something presents a problem.
Does anyone else have a memory like that? Google isn’t helping me out…
I’ll ask my brother, the editor, about “problematic.” [Note the correct use of appositive commas. I have but one brother. Aren’t I ever so correct?]
His latest concern was whether there really is a difference between “like” and “such as.” I figured that poor Miss Teen SC probably was using “such as” instead of the “um” version of “like”
Regarding “problematic,” Mr. Language Person responds:
“Words on Words,” “The Careful Writer,” the AP stylebook, and the Gregg Reference Manual are all mute on the topic. So I’d conclude that the traditional usage of problematic is not problematic.
The one I think should be accepted because of widespread use is “Everybody should do their own thing…” Everybody, singular, their, plural, but the only specific alternative is that clumsy he/or/she thing. Most of the world says “their” in this context. It’s simpler and understandable.
I dislike the wrong Hopefully but have given up on fixing it.
I’ll never give up on it’s and its. But it’s just about Hopeless.