There has been a considerable abatement in the fuss since and many commentators now accept the usage, but it seems safe to predict that there will be some who continue to revile it well into the next century.
What is newly popular will often be disparaged, and criticism followed rapidly, starting in 1962 and reaching a high point around 1975. To sum up: hopefully had been in sporadic American use as a sentence modifier for some thirty years before it suddenly caught fire in the early 1960s. Pretty much everyone who writes about English usage has taken on hopefully, and the informed consensus is solidly with Larry, but a bizarre irrational prejudice continues against sentence adverbial hopefully. (Not arguing with Lisa here, but with her long-ago professor and my fellow Usage Panelists who vote with the majority to condemn this perfectly ordinary and proper usage.) “Hopefully” is a sentence adverb in such contexts and has been used as such for decades - while also being a manner adverb in “The dog is sitting hopefully by her food dish”.
#ANOTHER WORD FOR HOPEFULLY FULL#
Larry Horn got in first, noting that there was nothing incorrect about the example Lisa Galvin reported that she had a professor long ago who said that the proper usage should be I hope rather than hopefully, since as it stands the sentence says “that the sun itself is full of hope that it will rise tomorrow” and Larry replied: What word should be used?Īnd then we were off on a familiar path.
In the sentence, “Hopefully, the sun will rise tomorrow” the word hopefully is being used incorrectly. It erupted on ADS-L yesterday, with this query from Dan Nussbaum: It’s one of those topics in English usage that just will not die.
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