Arnold Zwicky's Blog

An inventory of some postings on the adverb hopefully, divided into the pre-AP Stylebook period and the post-AP Stylebook period.

I include only materials available on-line; the printed advice literature and the scholarly usage literature (like MWDEU and the OED) are abundantly referred to in the items listed here.

Before the watershed tweet, listing only linguablogger and similarly linguistically informed items (and not the great mass of complaints about hopefully):

Cathleen Schine, NYT On Language, 6/20/93: ‘Hopefully Springs Eternal (link)

Fred R. Shapiro, American Speech 74.4.439-41 (1999): Earlier Computer-Assisted Evidence on the Emergence of Hopefully as a Sentence Adverb (link)

Grammar Girl, 9/21/07: Starting a Sentence With “Hopefully” (link)

AZ, LLog, 6/2/08: Avoiding potential ambiguity: Does it improve clarity? (link)

ML, LLog, 6/2/08: Advice from numbers (link)

Languagehat, 6/3/08: Hopefully (link)

Gabe Doyle, Motivated Grammar, 1/1/10: What’s wrong with “hopefully”? (link)

Jan Freeman, 9/16/10: The mystery of Edwin Newman (link)

Stan Carey, Macmillan Dictionary, 4/26/11: Hopefully disinterested (link)

Stan Carey, Macmillan Dictionary, 9/7/11: Hopefully you won’t object to this (link)

AZBlog, 4/5/12: Hopefully (link)

The watershed tweet and after. Linguablogger items are marked with an asterisk.

AP Stylebook, Twitter, 4/17/12 (link)

Monica Hesse, Washington Post, 4/17/12: AP’s approval of ‘hopefully’ symbolizes larger debate over language (link)

*John McIntyre, Baltimore Sun, 4/18/12: Hopefully, someone might learn something (link)

Clyde Haberman, NYT, 4/19/12: Is This the End of Proper Grammar? Hopefully Not (link)

Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon, 4/19/12: The audacity of “hopefully” (link)

Andrew Beaujon, Poynter, 4/19/12: Hopefully, this is the last we’ll write about ‘hopefully’ (link)

*Geoff Pullum, Lingua Franca, 4/23/12: ‘Hopefully’: Five Decades of Foolishness (link)

*Languagehat, 4/23/12: Hopefully II (link)

James L. Franklin, Boston Globe, 5/7/12: Hopefully, we’ll see it rarely (link)

*Gabe Doyle, Motivated Grammar, 5/17/12: Can we all admit none of us know what we’re talking about? (link)

*ML, LLog, 5/27/12: The H-word (link)

*ML, LLog, 5/27/12: Hopefully history (link)

*ML, LLog, 5/29/12: Hopeful(ly) grammar (link)

*Geoff Nunberg, Fresh Air, 5/30/12: The Word ‘Hopefully’Is Here To Stay, Hopefully (link)

*GN, LLog, 5/30/12: Why “Hopefully”? (link)

*Jan Freeman, 5/30/12: Nunberg on “hopefully” (link)

This entry was posted on June 1, 2012 at 10:20 am and is filed under Links, Modification, Usage advice, Usage attitudes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.