languagelog

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3983

In The H-word, I quoted MWDEU  to the effect that the sentence-adverb use of hopefully "was [traditionally] available if writers needed it, but few writers did". I also quoted MWDEU quoting Copperud 1970 to the effect that the "rapid expansion of use of hopefully as a sentence-modifier" began "about 1960″, and I exhibited a Google Ngrams plot supporting this date. And I quoted Bryan Garner as saying, among other things, that "the battle is now over", and "Hopefully is now a part of AmE". I didn't quote the end of that sentence, which asserts that hopefully "has all but lost its traditional meaning".

This morning (Istanbul time), I thought I'd take a closer quantitative look at the history of hopefully, using evidence from Mark Davies' Corpus of Historical American English. The executive summary of my conclusions:

• MWDEU was right — going back at least to the 1880s, roughly one hopefully in a hundred was the sentence-modifier type meaning "it is hoped" or "I/we/they hope";
• Copperud was right — in the COHA sample from the 1940s, 2 of 182 instances of hopefully were sentence-modifiers (1%); in the 1950s, the titre was 10 of 220 (4.5%); in the 1960s, it was 82 of 233 (35%).
• Garner was both right and wrong. By the 2000s, 76% of COHA's instances of hopefully are sentence-modifiers, many from esteemed writers in well-edited sources. So sentence-modifier hopefully is certainly part of American English. But the "traditional meaning" of hopefully, "in a hopeful manner", still accounts for 24% of instances, so it's misleading to say that this usage is "all but lost".

Some 1883 examples of sentence-modifier hopefully:

Allan Pinkerton, The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives, 1883: These facts Manning gleaned in a conversation with the proprietor of the hotel, while he was making his preparations to commence his search for the man whose crime had led him such a long chase, and whose detection now seemed hopefully imminent.

Professor W. Le Conte Stevens, "University Education for Women", North American Review, January 1883: Despite the political transgressions of the present generation, there are some subjects left in which it is hopefully possible to improve on the results left by our forefathers.

Some examples from the 1950s:

Henry A. Curran, "Happy-Marriage Week", Good Housekeeping July 1950: To put happiness on the map, even on the front page, for a whole week out of the year can not fail to achieve some good. The happiness that flourishes, unnoticed, in countless happy homes may not be news, but happiness celebrated simultaneously by millions immediately makes headlines. The forgotten man and woman, rediscovered once a year! Alone they are negligible; en masse they are news. Hopefully, Happy-Marriage Week will be unlike any of the well-worn celebrations now in existence. It will be unique in that it will sell an idea — something that is already in existence.

Hubert H. Humphrey, "A New Approach to Disarmament", The New Republic 12/24/1956: Just as the cause of disarmament may be furthered by the appointment of a neutral Chairman so might it be furthered by the creation of an impartial and objective United Nations technical staff. The reports prepared — and they should deal with legal, scientific and military questions — should be as objective as' possible. A United Nations staff should be able to consider the problems of the various nations more impartially than the staff assigned to the member delegations. It would, hopefully, help to create mutual trust and confidence among the five powers. Finally, such a staff would to a limited extent gain experience to function as an international secretariat soon after a disarmament agreement was reached.

It's worth noting that the authors using sentence-adverb hopefully in the 1950s and 1960s were hardly all undereducated boors publishing in provincial tabloids:

John Kenneth Galbraith, "The Poverty of Nations", The Atlantic Monthly Oct. 1962:  It is upon these assumptions, many of them self-contradictory and all of them of limited applicability, that we have based remedial action. One consequence of our planning is that within the next few years men will reach the moon, and hopefully the righteous will return, but the most acute problem of this planet will remain unsolved.

Paul Goodman, "For a reactionary experiment in education", Harpers Nov 1962:  Finally, one of the more perceptive proposals for college reform would help make the others more meaningful. Instead of throwing the new student hard up against a variety of choices and courses, it is proposed to make at least the freshman year an exploration? to help the young discover who they are and find ways to realize themselves. For example, at Harvard — largely, I think, through the efforts of Professor Riesman — freshmen can register in a seminar during their first year. This is a year-long bull-session, frequently provoked by visitors from the outside, which hopefully leads to concentration on fields of interest and specific reading and reports. Instead of the standard freshman " orientation " to the college world, it stimulates the students to question the college's purposes, strengths, and weaknesses as well as his [sic] own.

Morris West, The Shoes of the Fisherman 1963:  But I do not always hear the harmony. I must wrestle with the cacophony and apparent discord of the score, knowing that I shall not hear the final grand resolution until the day I die and, hopefully, am united with God.

Susan Sontag, Death Kit, 1967:  Diddy's telegram should be delivered to the Warren Institute in less than an hour. Who will read it to Hester? Hopefully, Mrs. Nayburn won't have returned yet. Then it would be the disagreeable Gertrude who brings the telegram to Hester's room. But if it should be the crass meddling aunt who recites his declaration, so what? Diddy has nothing to hide.

Thornton Wilder, Eighth Day, 1967:  John Ashley was quite right in wishing to be under forty when his children were passing through their teens. His parents were both forty when he was ten — that is to say they were beginning to be resigned to the knowledge that life was disappointing and basically meaningless; they were busily clutching at its secondary compensations: the esteem and (hopefully) the envy of the community in so far as they can be purchased by money and acquired by circumspect behavior, by an unremitting air of perfect contentment, and by that tone of moral superiority that bores themselves and others but which is as important as wearing clothes.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Triumph, 1967:   The AID, USIA, Treasury, the Bureau of the Budget, and Agriculture came together in Worth Campbell's office to discuss a package which, hopefully, would shore up and save the Martinez regime. At five o'clock word came that the President could meet with them that evening.

Given the fact that people like John Kenneth Galbraith, Susan Sontag, and Thornton Wilder were freely using sentence-modifier hopefully half a century ago, it shouldn't be news that this is part of standard American English.  And this history raises some questions for me about Bryan Garner's conclusion that

… though the controversy swirling around this word has subsided, it is now a skunked term. Avoid it in all senses if you're concerned with your credibility: if you use it in the traditional way, many readers will think it odd; if you use in the newish way, a few readers will tacitly tut-tut you.

I don't think that any sensible readers will "think it odd" if you write sentences like these, all from the past decade in COHA:

His brown eyes held hers and he smiled almost imperceptibly, hopefully.
Near the entrance, orange lantana sprouts hopefully from the hard-packed bare ground.
Several moments passed, during which Eliot waited hopefully for amplification.
She nodded disconsolately. "Maybe you could come along?" Her voice rose hopefully.
Then, Mandini looked at Lucas almost hopefully, as if willing to defer to an elder.
"Really?" The man's head bobbed hopefully.
Knot the yeti shuffled across the kitchen to stare hopefully at his fellow beasts.
One night in late May, when the cherry trees bloomed hopefully under the moon, she stuck her hips to his and just danced …

And if you give up a useful word because a few ignorant people will tut-tut you, the crazies win.

blog_of_quotes

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/unnecessaryquotes/RFdw/~3/zMqzyRVinYs/or-for-you.html

lolagranola

• Sat, 21:18: I enjoy Take That a little too much for a grown woman.
• Sat, 21:20: Why am I not watching Eurovision?

urbanwordofday

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=post%20traumatic%20test%20syndrome&defid=2646000

An anxiety disorder resulting from a test that kicked ones ass to the highest degree. Symptoms usually include depression, flashbacks, and binge drinking.

Post traumatic test syndrome or P.T.T.S rankes highest among college students.

That accounting test was so freaken hard, Im going to have a wicked case of post traumatic test syndrome for sure.

experimntl_theo

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2012/05/pentecost.html

calvinhobbesurl

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/uclick/calvinandhobbes/~3/xJzl96cttXw/27

http://www.gocomics.com//calvinandhobbes/2012/05/27

oed_wotd

http://www.oed.com:80/view/Entry/268709

culdesaccomic2

http://www.gocomics.com/culdesac/2012/05/27

http://www.gocomics.com//culdesac/2012/05/27

oots_gitp

http://www.GiantITP.com/comics/oots0854.html

languagelog

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3982

Clyde Haberman, "Is This the End of Proper Grammar? Hopefully Not", NYT, 4/19/2012.

Unsurprisingly, The Associated Press won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting early this week, for articles about the New York Police Department’s surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods and organizations in the wake of 9/11. Also unsurprising was fresh controversy that the award stirred, given the sensitive subject.

Curiously, that clamor proved to be but a warmup for more hullabaloo over the A.P., on an issue that is dearer to some people’s hearts than police spying. This is about language. Language, of course, is the soul of a culture.

He's talking about the AP Style Guide's decision to allow the use of hopefully as a sentence adverb, announced on Twitter at 6:22 a.m. on 17 April 2012:

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

I didn't notice, frankly;  the "hullabaloo" was a muted one, compared to (say) the Ruckus in the Rada. The Boston Globe copy desk sniffed "Hopefully, we'll see it rarely". Andrew Beaujon at poynter.org sighed "Hopefully, this is the last we’ll write about ‘hopefully’", and pointed out that

Cleverly, Clyde Haberman uses a sentence adverb to begin every paragraph of his story about the change, demonstrating that the prohibition was bunk in the first place, even if pouncing on such “errors” kept many fine copy editors employed (and, by extension, manufacturers of cardigans in business).

Use as a sentence modifier is common for adverbs made from adjectives describing emotional states (happily, mercifully, sadly, etc.). No one got upset when hopefully was now and then used in this way a hundred years ago, as in this passage from E. Morlae, "A soldier of the legion", The Atlantic Monthly, June 1916:

As silently as possible we entered between the trees and carefully kept in touch with each other. It was dark in there, and we had moved along some little distance before our eyes were used to the blackness. As I picked my steps I prepared myself for the shock every man experiences at the first sound of a volley. Twice I fell down into shell-holes and cursed my clumsiness and that of some other fellows to my right. The "Dutch" must be asleep,' I thought, or else they beat it.' Hopefully the latter!

So what happened? As the entry in Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage explains,

…hopefully does not appear to have been very widely used; it was available if writers needed it, but few writers did. […]

Copperud 1970 gives the date of the rapid expansion of use of hopefully as a sentence-modifier as "about 1960″. […] A 1963 edition of Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary recognizes the use. […]

The onslaught against hopefully in the popular press began in 1965, with denunciations in the Saturday Review (January), the New Yorker (March) and the New York Times (December). The ranks of hopefully haters grew steadily, reaching a peak around 1975, which is the year the issue seems to have crossed the Atlantic […] Viewer with alarm there would repeat all the things American viewers with alarm had said, and add the charge of "Americanism" to them. […]

In general, much of the furor in the press has abated since the high tide of the mid-1970s […] [O]n 10 November 1985 the Prince of Wales used the word during a televised press conference at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. What more prestigious cachet can be put on it?

The Google Ngram Viewer confirms 1960 as the start of a rapid increase in popularity for sentence-adverb hopefully, using hopefully the as a proxy for sentence-adverb status:

So hopefully-hysteria was not completely artificial — it was a reaction to a genuine change in fashion. But the reasons given — that hopefully was a hack translation from German hoffentlich, which was Follett's objection, or that adjectival hopeful could not be used as a sentence modifier with the same meaning, or that sentence-initial hopefully was meaningless stalling for compositional time — were clearly rationalizations of an emotional reaction to a change in relative frequency, rather than credible grammatical or even stylistic objections.

And by 1990 or so, most sensible people had either gotten over their reaction, or at least accepted the usage. Even E.B. White recognized the inevitability of a fashion he didn't care for: "I regard the word "hopefully" as beyond recall. I'm afraid it's here to stay, like pollution and sex and death and taxes" [letter 2/16/1970].

Still, hopefully-hysteria persists as a shibboleth of linguistic status display — what we've sometimes called a Zombie Rule. The usage note in the American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style sums this situation up nicely:

It would seem, then, that it is not the use of hopefully as a sentence adverb per se that bothers the Panel, since the comparable use of mercifully is acceptable to a large majority. Rather, hopefully seems to have taken on a life of its own as a sign that the the writer is unaware of the canons of usage.

Why do things like this happen? John McIntyre explains ("Hopefully, someone might learn something", The Baltimore Sun 4/18/2012):

In a New Yorker cartoon from thirty years ago, a man turns to another in a bar and asks belligerently, "Hopefullywise? Did I understand you to say hopefullywise?"

There you have the hopefully brouhaha encapsulated. The Wrong People, the sloppy, trendy vulgarians who tacked -wise indiscriminately onto adjectives were the same sort who would use hopefully as a sentence adverb. It's easy to identify the Wrong People: They belong to some group we like to look down on (advertising, say, or business people in general), they latch on to any linguistic fad that lumbers down the pike, they don't know their Latin, and they have no respect for The Rules.

In fact, sentence-modifier hopefully is a somewhat useful invention, as Cathleen Schine pointed out fastidiously in a 1993 (guest) On Language column in the New York Times Magazine ("Hopefully Springs Eternal", June 20,1993):

While the cat is away, let's play with a heretical notion. Let's engage in a spirited defense of the word hopefully. You know — the bad hopefully. The one without a verb to modify, or even an adjective to modify; the one floating, odd and defiant, at the beginning or the end of a sentence; the one you stop yourself from saying, train yourself never even to think — that hopefully.

I never touch the stuff, myself, and never will. I don't have the stomach for it. My lips draw back from it in horror. The resulting opprobrium is too great. I am a novelist, not a revolutionary. Having made that clear, I would like to say that I am also wrong.

The bad hopefully ought to be used without shame by all those who can bring themselves to do so — the less squeamish, the less prejudiced, the bold, the brave, the visionary. For this hopefully has developed a meaning, a nuance, that cannot be approximated by any other word or combination of words. Beyond being useful, hopefully is necessary, a profound modern expression of an exclusively modern sentiment. If there were no hopefully, man would have to invent it. And so we did.

Clyde Haberman's recent NYT article notes:

“The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage,” while acknowledging that “hopefully” is an adverb that “inflames passions,” cites surveys showing that “large majorities” of writers and teachers cling to the more restrictive use. So does The Times, and no change is contemplated for now, said Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards.

But the deprecated usage has been sneaking into NYT headlines for some time:

Mekado Murphy, "SXSW: Going to the Movies and Hopefully Getting In", 3/15/2010; Dave Itzkoff, "Matthew Weiner Explains Why ‘Mad Men’ Will (Hopefully) End Like ‘Abbey Road’", 7/14/2011; Lynn Zinser, "Today’s U.S. Open Rain Delay, Hopefully Only a Delay", 9/7/2011; …

In fact, it's not all that easy to find serious negative reactions to the A.P.'s decision in respectable publications. There's Mary Elizabeth Williams ("The audacity of 'hopefully: The AP Stylebook makes a change — and breaks our hearts", Salon 4/19/2012) — but even there the outrage is heavily ironized:

This week, the venerable AP Stylebook has decreed that “Hopefully, you will appreciate this style update, announced at #aces2012. We now support the modern usage of hopefully: it’s hoped, we hope.” To which a million language nerds replied, Noooo!

Perhaps you are the sort of person who wasn’t aware that saying things like, “Hopefully, it won’t rain this weekend” has long been considered a grammatical faux pas. One hopes that you received a deeper language-arts education than that. “Hopefully” is an adverb. An adverb, I tells ya, one that means to do something in a hopeful manner.

Ms. Williams demonstrates her allegiance to various other Zombie Rules, including several that have never had any basis outside the imagination of various self-appointed usage mavens:

Those of us who work with words grapple daily with the issue of where we slide and where we take a hard line. I die a little every time I see a “gonna” or “gotta,” and I’ll jump through linguistic hoops to avoid using “they” or “their” for the singular when the gender isn’t specified. There’s nothing like a note – from a teacher, for God’s sake – commanding that “Every child should bring their lunch” to make me want to switch exclusively to Latin. Yet I’m lax about ending sentences with a preposition, treat phrases like sentences for dramatic effect and use “rapey” and “stabby” and other made-up words on a regular basis. And I start half my sentences with conjunctions.

But this whole shtick is a sort of stagy imitation of a language crank, without the moral seriousness of a Kilpatrick or a Simon. Some commenters will no doubt point us to more earnest and resolute rejections of hopefully as a symptom of cultural decay — and perhaps others will enact such a reaction themselves. But as far as I can tell, this is an ex-controversy.

Bryan Garner agrees (Garner's Modern American Usage, 2009):

Four points about this word. First, it was widely condemned from the 1960s to the 1980s. […]

Second, whatever the merits of those arguments, the battle is now over. Hopefully is now a part of AmE, […]

Third, some stalwarts continue to condemn the word, so that anyone using it in the new sense is likely to have a credibility problem with some readers […]

Fourth, though the controversy swirling around this word has subsided, it is now a skunked term. Avoid it in all senses if you're concerned with your credibility: if you use it in the traditional way, many readers will think it odd; if you use in the newish way, a few readers will tacitly tut-tut you.

blog_of_quotes

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/unnecessaryquotes/RFdw/~3/lgc7PcwNbbY/american-or-whatever.html