| 词组 | hopefully |
| 释义 | hopefully No one knows why a word or phrase or construction suddenly becomes popular—it just happens. And when it does, it is sure to attract the displeased attention of some guardian of the language. The split infinitive, for instance, seems to have become suddenly popular during the 19th century, and there are still people who worry about it. The sentence-modifying use of the adverb hopefully is a like case, and it is recent enough that its history can be traced reasonably clearly. The adverb has been in use since the 17th century; Samuel Johnson in his 1755 dictionary lists two senses; Noah Webster in 1828 lists three. Neither seems to have encountered the word as a sentence modifier, but Johnson's third quotation may point to a source from which such a use could develop: • From your promising and generous endeavors we may hopefully expect a considerable enlargement of the history of nature. Glanville. But hopefully does not appear to have been very widely used; it was available if writers needed it, but few writers did. No clear-cut example of the sentence-modifying use has been found earlier than the 1932 example given in the OED Supplement. Even as late as the middle 1950s, examples are scarce. Our files have just a couple that are unmistakable: • The benefits to me and hopefully to our bank have been many —Richard A. Booth, U.S. Investor, 29 May 1954 • This gift was, of course, intended to help each of these institutions, but also at the same time to call attention dramatically to the inadequacy of salaries in the whole college-teaching profession, and hopefully, to encourage others to assist in improving what is clearly a very serious deficiency —Nathan M. Pusey, President's Report, Harvard University, 1955-1956 We have, besides these, several somewhat ambiguous examples. • The doctor had said hopefully two weeks in hospital, two weeks more in town, and then we could leave. Things didn't turn out as planned —Helen Thurber, letter, 14 July 1941 (If the doctor used the word, we have an example of the new use, but if it merely characterizes his manner and attitude as he spoke, the use is traditional. The context will not let us be sure which is the case.) • They are popular only in the sense of being, most of them, hopefully designed for the people —John W. Clark, in British and American English Since 1900, 1951 • If they ... confuse the advisability of pregnancy with that of having another highball, the hopefully unex-pectant mother should demand a change of venue — James Thurber, letter, 6 Dec. 1954 Copperud 1970, 1980 gives the date of the rapid expansion of use of hopefully as a sentence modifier as "about 1960." Bernstein 1962 exhibits a clear-cut example, presumably from the New York Times, and calls it solecistic. A 1963 edition of Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary recognizes the use. Copperud 1964 and Flesch 1964 both produce examples from unidentified newspapers and disapprove the use. The evidence in our files shows a considerable increase beginning in 1964. The onslaught against hopefully in the popular press began in 1965, with denunciations in the Saturday Review (January), the New Yorker (March) and the New York Times (December). The ranks of hopefully haters grew steadily, reaching a peak around 1975, which is the year the issue seems to have crossed the Atlantic (the OED Supplement has British examples of use dating from 1970). Viewers with alarm there would repeat all the things American viewers with alarm had said, and add the charge of "Americanism" to them. The locus classicus of most of the charges leveled against sentence-modifying hopefully is Follett 1966. Follett died in January 1963 (Jacques Barzun later editing the manuscript for posthumous publication), and it is likely that his analysis was one of the earliest to be written down. He seems to have been the originator of the theory that this use of hopefully was un-English and that it came from "hack translators" of German who used it to translate the German hoffentlich. But he does not produce any hack translations to back up his assertion; all his examples seem to be from American newspapers. Follett also tosses off in passing two of the other points that M. Stanley Whitley, in American Speech, Summer 1983, identifies as the chief objections to hopefully: a grammatical one concerned with the function of the adverb ("strains the sense of -ly to the breaking point"), and a social one objecting to people who use vogue words. He also complains that this hopefully lacks point of view (another much repeated charge), which seems reasonably close to the charges of ambiguity made by E. B. White in the New Yorker, 21 Mar. 1965, and in Strunk & White 1972, as well as by Barzun 1985 and others. His discussion lacks only a complaint about the loss of the original sense of the word. There is a good deal of entertainment to be had in examining many of the statements made about hopefully, but we haven't enough space here for so much detail; you will have to look into such books as Nickles 1974, Cook 1985, Harper 1975, 1985, Copperud 1964, 1970, 1980, Phythian 1979, Bremner 1980, Colter 1981, Johnson 1982, Freeman 1983, Einstein 1985, Newman 1974, and Michaels & Ricks 1980 for some of the more entertaining comments. We will, however, look a bit further at the supposed un-English origin of this use. Follett suggested that hopefully came from the translation of German hoffentlich as we have noted; Bernstein 1965 seems to be the first to have put that theory into print. German hoffentlich receives quite a bit of notice by the critics. Also mentioned by both American and British commentators is German hoffnungsvoll, which can be translated by hopefully in its uncontroversial sense. In addition we have a Southern California academic who, in a 1972 letter to the Times Literary Supplement mentions Yiddish; Simeon Potter, who is British, in the 1972 Compton Yearbook says he thinks it came through American Yiddish or Pennsylvania Dutch; and Einstein 1985 quotes a correspondent—also British—who would not have us overlook a Dutch word. All this is very ingenious but is not supported by a single shred of evidence. The earliest citation is from the New York Times Book Review, and all of the other early citations are American, so those British observers who complain about it as an Americanism, at least, are on solid ground. But we find no overt association with any foreign langauge in the early examples, nor are they from the sort of lofty academic prose in which one might detect a German influence. With such models as surely and certainly already long established, a foreign origin need not be sought. We should point out that opinion has not been unanimously opposed to this usage. Thomas H. Middleton expressed his acceptance of it in the Saturday Review in 1974, 1975, and 1976 at the height of the outcry against it. Many college handbooks took a measured approach, noting both widespread acceptance as well as opposition. Some opponents predicted that it would be accepted, and others gave up: • I regard the word "hopefully" as beyond recall. I'm afraid it's here to stay, like pollution and sex and death and taxes —E. B. White, letter, 16 Feb. 1970 Still other commentators changed their minds: • ... I sweat with embarrassment to read the article that I wrote about 'hopefully' in 1975 —Howard 1983 • To be quite honest, a decade ago I was on the side of the objectors, but in recent years additional thought about the matter has changed my mind —Bernstein 1977 William Safire came around to acceptance, his defection sourly noted by Kilpatrick 1984, still holding out. And Rudolf Flesch, who in 1964 was one of the earliest objectors, was by 1983 plugging the word: • After a quarter century of furious struggle, the purists have been roundly defeated It's an established, accepted, often needed English word. Don't shy away from it. —Flesch 1983 In general, much of the furor in the press has abated since the high tide of the mid-1970s. True, Edwin Newman has not changed his mind: • In addition, the "hopefully" disease is far advanced —San Francisco Examiner, 7 Oct. 1987 And all usage books and handbooks now have to take some notice of the question. But the storm appears to be moderating. And on 10 November 1985 the Prince of Wales used the word during a televised press conference at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. What more prestigious cachet can be put on it? Academics and literary people also use it, at least occasionally: • Hopefully some examples, especially those of Chapter IX, have already given rise to reflections —Strang 1970 • If you begin to elaborate it, you may gain something, but you'll lose the heart of it. That is, what the poem hopefully has —William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl, 1978 The sentence-modifying hopefully has by no means driven the older senses from use: • ... tempers the gloom, adding hopefully, "and there may be a lesson in that." —Baron 1982 • ... many who have set out hopefully upon it have turned back, frustrated and disheartened —Barnard 1979 To sum up: hopefully had been in sporadic American use as a sentence modifier for some thirty years before it suddenly caught fire in the early 1960s. What is newly popular will often be disparaged, and criticism followed rapidly, starting in 1962 and reaching a high point around 1975. There has been a considerable abatement in the fuss since and many commentators now accept the usage, but it seems safe to predict that there will be some who continue to revile it well into the next century. You can use it if you need it, or avoid it if you do not like it. There never was anything really wrong with it; it was censured, as Bolinger 1980 notes, because it was new, and it is not very new any more. Two substitutions, incidentally, have been proposed for sentence-modifying hopefully. One is hopingly, which is in Johnson 1755 and Webster 1828; it has not, however, been attested in use since 1883. The other is hopably or hopeably. Bremner 1980 asserts that it has been used, and he uses it himself, but Bernstein 1965, 1971, Safire 1980, and Cook 1985 call it nonexistent. We have no evidence of its use apart from Bremner. See also sentence adverb. |
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