Science and Technology news... :: View topic - Hopefully, someone can settle this family argument!

Martha G. Smith · Guest

Two members of my family both teach college English and disagree about
using "hopefully" to modify a whole sentence -- in the subject of this
post, for example!

My husband says there>s nothing wrong with it. My cousin says Strunk
& White condemn it.

???

Guest

On Jul 21, 4:19 pm, Martha G. Smith <mar...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
[quote]Two members of my family both teach college English and disagree about
using "hopefully" to modify a whole sentence -- in the subject of this
post, for example!

My husband says there>s nothing wrong with it. My cousin says Strunk
& White condemn it.
[/quote]
This is not exactly a newsgroup for prescriptive grammar, but anyway:
I have been told it is probably a calque from the German adverb
"hoffentlich". As a non-native speaker, I am in no position to condemn
it, but I see why there are people who don>t approve of this usage.
After all, it is not quite in line with the other, more established
meanings of the adjective "hopeful" and the adverb "hopefully" - it is
being used in a sense that would be more accurately covered by
"desirably".

Personally, I would use "hopefully" when *speaking* English, but
definitely not when writing anything above the level of formality of a
private letter.

Peter T. Daniels · Guest

On Jul 21, 9:46 am, angelgloww20...@yahoo.com wrote:
[quote]Martha G. Smith wrote:
Two members of my family both teach college English and disagree about
using "hopefully" to modify a whole sentence -- in the subject of this
post, for example!

My husband says there>s nothing wrong with it. My cousin says Strunk
& White condemn it.

???

"Hopefully, the man faced the firing squad, since the twelve riflemen
had bet their last bullets on his poker game the evening before the
execution."

The latter is the correct use of "hopefully" to modify "the man" (who
has hope, thanks to his poker skills).

COMPARE:

"Hopefully it will not rain on our parade."

Grammatically this is wrong; it should be, "I hope it will not rain on
our parade, or, as Babs Streisand put it, "Please don>t rain on my parade."

However, I am not a prescriptive grammarian.
[/quote]
When you write "The latter is the correct use" and "Grammatically this
is wrong," you most certainly are.

How is it that the "hopefully"-condemners never condemn any other
sentence adverbs?

Curiously, they never do.

[quote]More than a century ago,
Mr. Emerson praised the strength of the double negative and few would
quarrel with the idiomatic rejoinder, "How do you like them apples?" For
purists, "hopefully" can be construed as an ellipsis: "Hopefully [I am
of the opinion that] it will not rain on my parade." Hopefully, this
sentence will aggravate prescriptive grammarians.
[/quote]
It>ll intensify them? I certainly hope not.

Peter T. Daniels · Guest

On Jul 21, 10:37 am, "Mike Lyle" <mike_lyle...@REMOVETHISyahoo.co.uk>
wrote:
[quote]Martha G. Smith wrote:
Two members of my family both teach college English and disagree about
using "hopefully" to modify a whole sentence -- in the subject of this
post, for example!

My husband says there>s nothing wrong with it. My cousin says Strunk
& White condemn it.

???

What everybody else said is right, but so is what I>m going to say. (1)
Anybody who thinks "hopefully" is more succinct than "I hope", "we
hope", "they hoped", etc, can>t count.
[/quote]
Who has suggested that?

[quote](2) Anybody who doesn>t see that
"hopefully" used as a sentence-adverb is ugly is to be pitied.
[/quote]
Anyone who condemns a Germanic construction on the grounds that
Latinate constructions are "prettier" (i.e., less "ugly") is living in
the wrong age. Please return to the era of, at least, the Counter-
Reformation.

[quote](3)
Anybody who gets worked up about the matter needs a more rewarding
hobby, such as fighting tooth and nail against the moronic recent use of
"Can I get..?" instead of "May I have..?" or "No problem!" as a response
to "Thank you."
[/quote]
Do you prefer "cheers" or "ta"?

Peter T. Daniels · Guest

On Jul 21, 9:46 am, Craoibhi...@gmail.com wrote:
[quote]On Jul 21, 4:19 pm, Martha G. Smith <mar...@invalid.invalid> wrote:

Two members of my family both teach college English and disagree about
using "hopefully" to modify a whole sentence -- in the subject of this
post, for example!

My husband says there>s nothing wrong with it. My cousin says Strunk
& White condemn it.

This is not exactly a newsgroup for prescriptive grammar,
[/quote]
mind the crossposts

[quote]but anyway:
I have been told it is probably a calque from the German adverb
"hoffentlich". As a non-native speaker, I am in no position to condemn
it, but I see why there are people who don>t approve of this usage.
After all, it is not quite in line with the other, more established
meanings of the adjective "hopeful" and the adverb "hopefully" - it is
being used in a sense that would be more accurately covered by
"desirably".

Personally, I would use "hopefully" when *speaking* English, but
definitely not when writing anything above the level of formality of a
private letter.[/quote]

HVS · Guest

On 21 Jul 2008, Martha G. Smith wrote

[quote]Two members of my family both teach college English and disagree
about using "hopefully" to modify a whole sentence -- in the
subject of this post, for example!

My husband says there>s nothing wrong with it. My cousin says
Strunk & White condemn it.

???
[/quote]
"Sentence adverbs" -- words like "hopefully", "frankly", and
"seriously" -- have been used to qualify the whole of a sentence
since at least the 17th century. The usage has, however, increased
greatly in the past 30 or 40 years.

Regardless of the historical precedents, though, it>s futile to argue
the point with people like your cousin: you>ll never win an argument
on the "correctness" of the usage with someone who>s convinced it>s a
modern, barbaric solecism.

So your husband>s right and your cousin and S&W are, in my view,
displaying historical illiteracy. (But I>ll put money on you never
being able to change your coussin>s mind on the issue.)

--
Cheers, Harvey
CanEng and BrEng, indiscriminately mixed

Peter T. Daniels · Guest

[followups repaired]

On Jul 21, 12:57 pm, HVS <use...@REMOVETHISwhhvs.co.uk> wrote:
[quote]On 21 Jul 2008, Thomas wrote
[/quote]
Nothing that I saw. Apparently this "Thomas" person chose to reply
directly to me, but to cut my newsgroup out of the distribution of his
message.

Is "Thomas" an aue-poster of less than normal intellect?

[quote]"HVS" == HVS <use...@REMOVETHISwhhvs.co.uk> writes:
Since "hopefully"-condemners are a large and rising
proportion of recognized experts on usage,

HVS> Do you have any evidence at all for that? It>s certainly
HVS> counterintuitive to me.

Somebody in this thread cited figures to the effect that as
"hopefully" has become more common members of usage panels have
turned ever more against it.

Ah; fair enough.

I suspect most of that, though, is advice to "avoid it so you don>t
upset those who get upset", rather than "avoid it because it>s
incorrect", though. (Like avoiding split infinitives, or not
starting sentences with "and" -- that category of usage advice.)
[/quote]
I note that my question was not answered.

Peter T. Daniels · Guest

On Jul 21, 12:54 pm, "John Dean" <john-d...@fraglineone.net> wrote:
[quote]Martha G. Smith wrote:
Two members of my family both teach college English and disagree about
using "hopefully" to modify a whole sentence -- in the subject of this
post, for example!

My husband says there>s nothing wrong with it. My cousin says Strunk
& White condemn it.

???

Your cousin is quite right. Strunk and White *do* condemn it. They say it is
"not merely wrong, it is silly." You don>t say whether your cousin agrees
with S & W. Remember, Strunk has been dead a long time and White is the guy
who wrote stories about pigs and talking spiders.
Your husband is quite right. There>s nothing wrong with it. As Bob
Burchfield says in his "New Fowler>s Modern English Usage - " ... In the
20th century there has been a swift and immoderate increase in the currency
of [such] adverbs [which] include actually, basically, frankly, hopefully,
regretfully, strictly, and thankfully. Suddenly, round about the end of the
1960s, and with unprecedented venom, a dunce>s cap was placed on the head of
anyone who used just one of them - hopefully - as a sentence adverb.... the
present widespread use of sentence adverbs is no more than an acceleration
of a much older process. The OED entry for seriously (sense 1) has an
example of 1644: ... 'Except here and there an officer (and seriously I saw
not above three or four that looked like a gentleman).' [...] The
proposition, then, can be amended as follows: since at least the seventeenth
century, certain adverbs ending in -ly have acquired the ability to qualify
a predication or assertion as a whole. In the last third of the twentieth
century, this little-used and scarcely observed mechanism of language has
broken loose.
Since at least the 17th century, certain adverbs in -ly have acquired the
ability to qualify a predication or assertion as a whole. Such adverbs are
elliptical uses of somewhat longer phrases. ... Conservative speakers,
taken unawares by the sudden expansion of an unrecognised type of
construction, have exploded with resentment that is unlikely to fade away
before at least the end of the 20th century."
[/quote]
And they let a guy who writes like that assume the mantle of one of
the great stylists of the 20th century, Henry W. Fowler? Ugh.

[quote]Your husband is quite wrong. It is an obscenity, a wen, a pustule on the
face of our fair language.
[/quote]
How do you reconcile that outburst with the following paragraph?

[quote]Truth is, it seems to be one of those uses that is on its way to being
accepted. This may take another hundred years or so, but it will probably
happen. I suspect there will come a generation of grammarians who will point
out that, used in this way, the "sentence modifying adverbs" are not really
being used as adverbs and are not really modifying anything. They are
shorthand versions of longer phrases.
So, for instance, in your subject line, "hopefully" modifies nothing that
follows it. It stands for "I hope that" or even "it is to be hoped that". As
is usually pointed out, this is a borrowing from the German 'hoffentlich'.
[/quote]
What evidence is there that it is a "borrowing," and not a perennial
feature of English style?

[quote]Similarly - "Seriously, I hope you>re happy with the range of answers here
and that they help you to make your mind up." doesn>t use 'seriously to
modify the following sentence not any word or phrase in it. You could delete
it and the sentence would mean the same. All you would lose is the idea that
I am emphasising the genuineness of my wish that you resolve the matter.[/quote]

Peter T. Daniels · Guest

On Jul 21, 2:00 pm, Derek Turner <frde...@cesmail.net> wrote:
[quote]On Mon, 21 Jul 2008 07:19:00 -0600, Martha G. Smith wrote:
Two members of my family both teach college English and disagree about
using "hopefully" to modify a whole sentence

If it means 'it is to hoped' rather than 'in a hopeful manner' then I
would condemn it outright. But that>s a losing if not already lost battle.
[/quote]
On what grounds would you "condemn" a centuries-old feature of English
style and grammar? Who made you Grand Inquisitor of English?

Peter Duncanson (BrE) · Guest

On Mon, 21 Jul 2008 07:19:00 -0600 (MDT), Martha G. Smith
<martha@invalid.invalid> wrote:

[quote]Two members of my family both teach college English and disagree about
using "hopefully" to modify a whole sentence -- in the subject of this
post, for example!

My husband says there>s nothing wrong with it. My cousin says Strunk
& White condemn it.

???
The use of "hopefully" as a sentence modifier has been discussed[/quote]
many times. The FAQ for this newgroup says:
http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxhopefu.html

[various things]

AHD3 says: "It might have been expected that the flurry
of objections to hopefully would have subsided once the
usage became well established. Instead, increased currency
of the usage appears only to have made the critics more
adamant. In the 1969 Usage Panel survey the usage was
acceptable to 44 percent of the Panel; in the most recent
survey [1992] it was acceptable to only 27 percent.
[...] Yet the Panel has not shown any signs of becoming
generally more conservative: in the very same survey
panelists were disposed to accept once-vilified usages such
as the employment of contact and host as verbs." AHD3
quotes William Safire as saying: "The word 'hopefully' has
become the litmus test to determine whether one is a
language snob or a language slob."

Discussions about "hopefully" and "thankfully" go round
and round for ever without reaching a conclusion. We advise
you to refrain.

See also Michael Quinion>s thoughts at:
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-hop2.htm

....
In its favour, hopefully conforms to a type of construction
that is far from new, is a useful condensation of an idea
that would otherwise require a wordy circumlocution, and is
widely used. It is hard to provide much in the way of a list
of objections save that it has become a shibboleth of
correctness among conservative grammarians and stylists,
which requires today’s writer, even forty years after the
great witch hunt began, to be a little circumspect in
bringing it into action. As always with any sort of writing,
you need to consider your audience. For myself, as you have
noticed, I use it when it seems appropriate, untroubled by
any potential strictures. That’s because I have a stack of
modern style guides ranged at my back, chorusing that it is
standard English and that it is both acceptable and
accepted.

--
Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.usage.english)

Guest

Martha G. Smith wrote:

[quote]Two members of my family both teach college English and disagree about
using "hopefully" to modify a whole sentence -- in the subject of this
post, for example!

My husband says there>s nothing wrong with it. My cousin says Strunk
& White condemn it.

???

"Hopefully, the man faced the firing squad, since the twelve riflemen[/quote]
had bet their last bullets on his poker game the evening before the
execution."

The latter is the correct use of "hopefully" to modify "the man" (who
has hope, thanks to his poker skills).

COMPARE:

"Hopefully it will not rain on our parade."

Grammatically this is wrong; it should be, "I hope it will not rain on
our parade, or, as Babs Streisand put it, "Please don>t rain on my parade."

However, I am not a prescriptive grammarian. More than a century ago,
Mr. Emerson praised the strength of the double negative and few would
quarrel with the idiomatic rejoinder, "How do you like them apples?" For
purists, "hopefully" can be construed as an ellipsis: "Hopefully [I am
of the opinion that] it will not rain on my parade." Hopefully, this
sentence will aggravate prescriptive grammarians.

Donna Richoux · Guest

Martha G. Smith <martha@invalid.invalid> wrote:

[quote]Two members of my family both teach college English and disagree about
using "hopefully" to modify a whole sentence -- in the subject of this
post, for example!

My husband says there>s nothing wrong with it. My cousin says Strunk
& White condemn it.

White (who wrote all but the first part of "The Elements of Style") did[/quote]
come out against "hopefully" as a sentence adverb; I>m looking at page
48 the 1979 paperback; that was the decade in which the word suddenly
appeared as a overworked fad.

You can find what he said, and a general article on why he was on the
losing side, here, so I will not quote it:

http://grammar.about.com/b/2007/12/05/hopefully-indeed-sentence-adverbs.
htm
Hopefully Indeed: Sentence Adverbs
Wednesday December 5, 2007

I don>t know to what extent "The Elements of Style" has been revised
since White died in 1985 (ol' Strunk was long gone, 1946). White>s
general advice on good writing is timeless, but particular lost causes
are bound to look fussy and dated. No one is going to succeed in having
all of their personal preferences carried out by succeeding generations,
not even the grand and glorious E.B. White himself.

I think your family members should each do as they think best, and not
worry about whether they agree.

--
Best wishes -- Donna Richoux

Mike Lyle · Guest

Martha G. Smith wrote:
[quote]Two members of my family both teach college English and disagree about
using "hopefully" to modify a whole sentence -- in the subject of this
post, for example!

My husband says there>s nothing wrong with it. My cousin says Strunk
& White condemn it.

???
[/quote]
What everybody else said is right, but so is what I>m going to say. (1)
Anybody who thinks "hopefully" is more succinct than "I hope", "we
hope", "they hoped", etc, can>t count. (2) Anybody who doesn>t see that
"hopefully" used as a sentence-adverb is ugly is to be pitied. (3)
Anybody who gets worked up about the matter needs a more rewarding
hobby, such as fighting tooth and nail against the moronic recent use of
"Can I get..?" instead of "May I have..?" or "No problem!" as a response
to "Thank you."

Have a nice day, now.

--
Mike.

HVS · Guest

On 21 Jul 2008, Mike Lyle wrote

[quote]Martha G. Smith wrote:
Two members of my family both teach college English and
disagree about using "hopefully" to modify a whole sentence --
in the subject of this post, for example!

My husband says there>s nothing wrong with it. My cousin says
Strunk & White condemn it.

???

What everybody else said is right, but so is what I>m going to
say. (1) Anybody who thinks "hopefully" is more succinct than "I
hope", "we hope", "they hoped", etc, can>t count.
[/quote]
That glosses over the cases where the alternative forms strike an
inappropriate tone.

"I hope the meeting will go ahead as planned" can be too personal;
"We hope..." sounds frightfully royal, doncha' know; and "It is to
be hoped..." can come across as pompous as hell.

[quote](2) Anybody
who doesn>t see that "hopefully" used as a sentence-adverb is
ugly is to be pitied. (3) Anybody who gets worked up about the
matter needs a more rewarding hobby, such as fighting tooth and
nail against the moronic recent use of "Can I get..?" instead of
"May I have..?" or "No problem!" as a response to "Thank you."

Have a nice day, now.
[/quote]
No problem!

--
Cheers, Harvey
CanEng and BrEng, indiscriminately mixed

Ekkehard Dengler · Guest

Martha G. Smith wrote:
[quote]Two members of my family both teach college English and disagree about
using "hopefully" to modify a whole sentence -- in the subject of this
post, for example!

My husband says there>s nothing wrong with it. My cousin says Strunk
& White condemn it.
[/quote]
I hope you find this helpful:

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/hopefully

Regards,
Ekkehard


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