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‘Hopefully the critics will come to their senses,’ writes Patricia O’Connor in her new book Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language. She is American, and I came across her verdict in The New York Times Book Review last month. She would include Mr Heffer among the ‘fuddy-duddies’ resisting evolution of usage.
The problem is that some adverbs (such as rapidly) qualify verbs and verbal phrases. Others (such as surprisingly) can qualify whole clauses or sentences. Until the 1960s hopefully was usually numbered among the former, although it had been used in the extended sense since the 1930s. The first citation, from 1932, is: ‘He would create… a selected list of ex-Governors, hopefully not including Pa and Ma Ferguson.’
It is strange that hopefully was singled out for obloquy, when a number of other adverbs had been behaving as shadily as MPs. ‘Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn,’ was not the first example of such phraseology. ‘Frankly, if you can like my niece, win her,’ wrote Bulwer Lytton in Lucretia, or, The Children of Night. Now, Lucretia might have been a shocking bad novel, but Lytton was reflecting the usage of his day (1846). The adverb seriously extended its range much earlier. The OED gives an example from 1644, in the diary of Richard Symonds, a royalist soldier and reliable antiquary: ‘Here and there an officer, (and seriously I saw not above three or four that looked like a gentleman)…’.
The creeping recruitment of adverbs is a reason given by Michael Dummett, the former Wykeham professor of logic, to regret innovation in the case of hopefully. In his book Grammar & Style (1993) he concluded that ‘the new use of hopefully cannot now be dislodged; but it is still better to avoid it’. If you cannot, put it at the beginning of the sentence to avoid ambiguity. For myself, I do not much mind the new sense. Perhaps I should have become an MP.
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