It Is with Hope: The Convoluted History of the Word “Hopefully”
A Café Confictura To-Go mini-post by Roscoe Belesprit
Think of a sentence that uses the word “hopefully.”
I’ll wait.
Chances are you thought of a sentence like, “Hopefully, Roscoe will get to his point soon.” The word “hopefully” here basically means “I hope,” right?
What if I told you that, up until recently, that was the wrong use of “hopefully” and that most people have used it incorrectly for generations? That using “hopefully” to mean “I hope” was not the original intention of that word?
The original meaning of the word was “with hope.” As in: “People look to the New Year hopefully for a fresh start.”
It’s a subtle difference, I know, one that can be tough to understand. It’s so tough, in fact, that in 2012, the AP Stylebook, which is the industry grammar guidebook for American journalists, scrapped their erstwhile rule against using “hopefully” to mean “I hope.”
Basically, the Stylebook threw up their hands and said, “No one knows what the hell this rule means anyway.”*
*Not a direct quote.
But let’s back up a little.
“Hopefully,” no matter how you’re using it, is an adverb. Adverbs are descriptive words commonly used to modify verbs and other parts of speech. (For instance, the word “commonly” in that sentence is an adverb modifying the word “used.”)
There are certain adverbs in the English language that fall under a category called “disjuncts,” and the adverb “hopefully” is one such odd duck. Disjuncts can be used not only to modify the verb in a sentence, but they can also modify the speaker’s mood on the sentence as a whole. For instance:
In our earlier example, “People look to the New Year hopefully for a fresh start,” the adverb “hopefully” is modifying the verb “look.” We could also say it like this: “People look hopefully to the New Year for a fresh start.”
But because “hopefully” is a disjunct, it is also used to modify how the speaker of a sentence feels, as in the example “Hopefully, Roscoe will get to his point soon.” Here, the sentence means “I hope Roscoe will get to his point soon,” so we’re modifying how the speaker of the sentence feels, not how the verb is described. The verb in the sentence is “get,” but we’re not saying, “Roscoe will get with hope to his point soon,” and so “hopefully” is not acting like a normal adverb in this case.
Yes, that is completely confusing.
And that’s why the AP Styleguide now says it’s acceptable to use “hopefully” the way most of us already do, even though academic hard-liners still stick to the original rule of only using it to modify a verb.
This is how I keep it all straight in my head:
If you can swap out the word “hopefully” for “I hope,” then you’re using the disjunctive form that has been frowned on in the past.
If you can swap out the word “hopefully” for “with hope,” then you’re staying true to the original intent of the word “hopefully.”
Incidentally, there are other disjuncts. Like how I just used “incidentally.”
But that’s a confusing blog post for another day.
Note: If you’re a grammar geek like I am and actually want to read more about this, two good sources to review are the “hopefully” entry in Merriam-Webster at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hopefully and the NPR article from 2012 in the wake of AP’s decision: “The Word ‘Hopefully’ is Here to Stay, Hopefully” at https://www.npr.org/2012/05/30/153709651/the-word-hopefully-is-here-to-stay-hopefully.
To read more about Roscoe Belesprit’s literary salon in the fictional series Sketches from the Café Confictura, click or tap here.
This and any related blog posts are works of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Any reference to living or dead public figures, entities, places, events, and the like, are of a fictional, opinioned, and/or parodic nature. No healthcare professionals have been consulted in writing this. Any advice given or inferred is anecdotal and used at your own risk. Consult your doctor in all healthcare matters.
Clarissa J. Markiewicz is the author of Christmas In Whimsy — a heartwarming, fun novel readers compare to Hallmark Christmas movies, and recipient of Readers’ Favorite 5-star Seal — and the genre-bending new-age mystery The Paramour Pawn.
