Charles Darwin wrote in a letter in 1847, “Oddly, I was never at all staggered by this theory until now”. Fielding employed luckily in Tom Jones in 1749: “Luckily, he had fallen into more merciful hands”. Though sentence adverbs came into the language in earnest in the twentieth century, it’s possible to find older examples. It’s the compactness of these forms that’s their attraction, one that seems to fit our hurried modern lifestyle. As we’ve seen, hopefully is short for “it is to be hoped that”, thankfully can be rephrased as “by good fortune”, or “as luck would have it”, frankly as “to speak frankly”, and so on. In grammatical terms, they’re elliptical forms that abbreviate a comment into a single word. There are perhaps a dozen or so that people use in this way, including frankly (“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”), strictly (“Strictly, one ought not to use this construction”), thankfully (“Thankfully, the surfboard missed his head”), and actually (“Actually, I don’t really like taramasalata”). Such adverbs are usually (but not by any means always) the first word in the sentence, and are often marked off with a comma from what follows.

The objection is not only to hopefully, though that word has suffered more than most, but to the twentieth-century fashion for a set of such words - which grammarians often call sentence adverbs - in which the word refers not just to one part of a sentence but to the whole construction. What has alarmed and annoyed language purists is its comparatively modern appearance in the sense of “it is to be hoped that”, as in “Hopefully, we’ll win the contract”, or “Hopefully, it won’t rain on the parade”. The objection is not to the word itself: it has been used for centuries in the sense of “In a hopeful manner with a feeling of hope” (the Oxford English Dictionary records its first use from 1639) and there’s nothing controversial in employing it like this, for example in the proverb “It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive”. There are few issues of usage that are as contentious as the matter of hopefully almost every modern style guide contains a paragraph warning of the objections of conservative grammarians to it. Perhaps you could prepare a summary of the pros and cons for your site?Ī I’ll do more than that, because your query provides a peg on which to hang as complete a discussion of the whole issue as would seem to be required. My curiosity has now been whetted, but not sated. After a search I noticed that you mentioned it again in reviewing two dictionaries, but you also used it yourself in other articles (so I’ll happily continue to use it). Q From Grahame Gould: You mentioned in your piece on irregardless that there was some controversy surrounding hopefully.

Hopefully we can