But will it mean the same thing? 'One' means a person, some person, an epitome of a person. 'Hopefully, it will not rain on our parade.' 'Hopefully, I will survive this operation.' 'The Mets will not finish in last place - hopefully!' It is true that you could substitute the prim alternative 'One hopes' in each of these cases. Think, for a moment, what it is that hopefully does. 'It seems that this use of hopefully,' my dictionary says, 'has been made a litmus test, which distinguishes writers who take an active interest in questions of grammar or usage from the great mass of people who keep their own linguistic counsel.' I, personally, prefer to count myself among writers who take an active interest in questions of grammar rather than among this, or any, great mass of people, but that is merely a matter of snobbery and cowardice. And yet hopefully is scorned and spurned. When Clark Gable turned to Vivien Leigh and said, 'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn,' it was not his daring use of frankly as an adverb with no verb to modify that caused an uproar among right-thinking people. The Usage Note author cannot account for this, noting that the usage panel had 'not shown any signs of becoming generally more conservative' that the word's acceptance by the public attests to its usefulness that there is no exact substitute that there are other words used analogously, like happily and mercifully, that excite no such controversy. Instead, increased currency of the usage appears only to have made the critics more adamant.' that the initial flurry of objections to hopefully would have subsided once the usage became well established. 'It might have been expected,' observes the anonymous author of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Note, '. In my American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Third Edition), there is a long Usage Note for hopefully (longer even than the Usage Note provided for host used as a verb) that, with considerable delicacy, conscious amusement and a clear sense of drama, discusses the status of hopefully, the sentence adverb. Grammatical propriety cannot countenance it, even if grammatical propriety cannot explain why not. Hopefully is anathema it is black shoes with brown pants, a white skirt worn after Labor Day, the dessert fork with the lamb chop, inter-species sex. Anyone who reads a language column is as sensitive to the noise of hopefully used as a 'sentence adverb,' as my dictionary puts it, as he or she is to the grating sound of 'lay' used as an intransitive verb. You know all the above, right? It's mother's milk to you.

It is not considered proper usage, on the other hand, to say, 'Hopefully, this makes sense.' For who, in that case, is doing the hoping? And what is being modified? Surely I do not mean that 'this' is making sense in a hopeful way. I am allowed, grammatically, to speak to myself hopefully. ' 'This makes perfect sense,' I say to myself hopefully.' Hopefully describes the way in which I am speaking to myself. ), the problem is that hopefully is properly used only as an adverb modifying a verb or an adjective.

The problem with hopefully, as all grammar-proud men and women know (even those who came to these discoveries late, in college, a Chaucer class, it was humiliating, I'll never forget. If there were no hopefully, man would have to invent it. Beyond being useful, hopefully is necessary, a profound modern expression of an exclusively modern sentiment. For this hopefully has developed a meaning, a nuance, that cannot be approximated by any other word or combination of words. The bad hopefully ought to be used without shame by all those who can bring themselves to do so - the less squeamish, the less prejudiced, the bold, the brave, the visionary. Having made that clear, I would like to say that I am also wrong. I never touch the stuff, myself, and never will.

The one without a verb to modify, or even an adjective to modify the one floating, odd and defiant, at the beginning or the end of a sentence the one you stop yourself from saying, train yourself never even to think - that hopefully. Let's engage in a spirited defense of the word hopefully. While the cat is away, let's play with a heretical notion.

Hopefully meaning