hopefully usage - what you may not know! The traditional sense of hopefully, ‘in a hopeful manner’, has been used since the 17th century. In the second half of the 20th century a new use, commenting on the whole sentence, arose, meaning ‘it is to be hoped that’, as in hopefully, we’ll see you tomorrow. This second use is now very much commoner than the first use, but it is still widely believed to be incorrect. This is somewhat illogical. People do not criticize other similar adverbs, e.g. sadly (as in sadly, her father died last year) or fortunately (as in fortunately, he recovered). Part of the reason is that hopefully is a rather odd adverb of this kind: while many others, such as sadly, regrettably, and clearly, may be paraphrased as ‘it is sad /regrettable/ clear that…’, this is not possible with hopefully. Nevertheless, it is clear that use of hopefully has become a test case of ‘correctness’ in the language—even if the arguments on which this is based are not particularly strong—and it may be wise to avoid its use in formal or written contexts.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 10:24:24 +0000
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