![]() ![]() It gained in popularity over the next three decades, and in the 1960s, it caught the attention of usage guide writers, at which point prescriptive criticism of sentence adverb hopefully took hold. Hopefully started to be used as a sentence adverb in the 1930s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Hopefully is now doing the same thing, but usage guides tell us that we shouldn’t do that, that it’s ambiguous. Or, consider the sentence adverb mercifully, which describes how I feel-or how many people feel, or how I think many people may feel (it is ambiguous)-about the proposition that I’m forwarding (e.g., “Mercifully, the budget cuts will be limited”). Take, for instance, frankly or bluntly: these adverbs express how I, as a speaker, feel about what I’m saying. Linguists call adverbs used this way “sentence adverbs.” They’re adverbs that modify the sentence or how the speaker feels about the sentence, and we have a good number of them in English. ![]() When we say, “Hopefully, she opened the package,” we typically mean, “I hope she opened it”-we’re not talking about how she opened it, full of hope. Why doesn’t the Microsoft Word grammar checker like it when we use hopefully at the beginning of a sentence, as in, “Hopefully, there won’t be budget cuts this year.”Įtymologically, hopefully comes from ‘full of hope’, as in, “She opened the package hopefully.” But this isn’t now how most of us use the word hopefully. ![]()
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