1178. Do you cringe when someone says "Hopefully, he'll pass the test"? This week, we look at why "hopefully" as a sentence adverb has been controversial for decades, even though the Associated Press accepted it in 2012, and it's been common since the 1930s. Then, we look at xenolinguistics — the study of alien languages — asking what human languages have in common and why (and how) alien languages might be completely different.
1178. Do you cringe when someone says "Hopefully, he'll pass the test"? This week, we look at why "hopefully" as a sentence adverb has been controversial for decades, even though the Associated Press accepted it in 2012, and it's been common since the 1930s. Then, we look at xenolinguistics — the study of alien languages — asking what human languages have in common and why (and how) alien languages might be completely different.
The xenolinguistics segment was by Natalie Schilling.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and today we’re talking about starting a sentence with the word "hopefully" and why that still gets some people upset. Then, we look at what an alien language might be like.
For centuries, the word “hopefully” meant “in a hopeful manner.” For example, the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in his essay “El Dorado,” “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive,” meaning that enjoying the journey, traveling with a hopeful disposition, is better than getting to your destination.
“Hopefully” plays the role of an adverb in that sentence. It’s modifying the verb “travel” the same way adverbs like “quickly” or “frugally” would. You could travel quickly, travel frugally, or travel hopefully. Traveling hopefully sounds like more fun.
But words can take on new uses over time, and in the 1960s people started using "hopefully" to mean "I hope" or "we hope," as in “Hopefully, we get to go on vacation this year.” In reality, people have been using "hopefully" this way since the 1600s, and according to Merriam-Webster, it's been widespread since the 1930s; but it became trendy in the 1960s, and when uses become trendy, they can start to annoy people, and that's what happened with "hopefully."
In that sentence — “hopefully, we get to go on vacation this year” — “hopefully” is playing the role of a sentence adverb. “Hopefully” means “I am hopeful that we’ll get to go on vacation this year.” In that kind of sentence, “hopefully’ is just like the sentence adverbs “thankfully,” “mercifully,” and “fortunately.” You see, adverbs modify verbs, but they can also modify other adverbs or, as they do in this case, whole sentences. “Hopefully, we get to go on vacation this year,” is just like “Thankfully, we get to go on vacation this year,” and “Fortunately, we get to go on vacation this year.”
The American Heritage Dictionary has useful entries called “usage notes” that tell you when a word is controversial, and they say people are being illogical when they object to “hopefully” being used as a sentence adverb. They do usage surveys, and they find that people aren’t bothered by sentence adverbs in general — very few people object to “mercifully” being used as a sentence adverb, for example — it seems that people object only to “hopefully” being a sentence adverb. It seems to be special, in a bad way, and the only explanation American Heritage can muster is that people didn’t like “hopefully” at first because it was trendy, and then even after the trendiness wore off and “hopefully” became ubiquitous in everyday speech (which it is), language sticklers held on to the objection as more of a marker of who knows how to use English than for any logical reason.
Way back in 2012, the Associated Press acknowledged that many writers use "hopefully" as a sentence adverb and changed the AP Stylebook to formally allow it. At the time, I welcomed the change. David Minthorn, the former deputy standards editor for the Associated Press at the time, said he was surprised at the attention they got for making the change, but that they are realists at the AP, and you "just can't fight it" when it comes to people using "hopefully" this way.
I was curious if attitudes had changed in the intervening years, so I recently checked the newest edition of Garner's Modern English Usage, which came out in 2022 — a full 10 years after the AP Stylebook change. He had previously also said that fighting this change is a "lost cause," but he still puts "hopefully" to express hope at the beginning of a sentence at stage 4 on his Language Change Index: ubiquitous but opposed on cogent grounds by a few linguistic stalwarts. Not at stage 5: fully accepted.
Further, he calls it a skunked term, meaning that no matter how you use it, you'll annoy or confuse some people. The new use will bug the stalwarts, and the old use will sound old-fashioned to others.
And honestly (to use another sentence adverb some people don't like), I hate this answer! Garner partly based his ranking on a Twitter poll he did in 2020 asking whether this use of "hopefully," its common use to mean "I hope" or "it is hoped that," either was wholly unobjectionable or retained a bad odor, and only 58% of his respondents said it was OK.
So I thought, "Well, we'll see about that!" and flounced off to do my own social media polls, sure that my followers would be more accepting. And for the most part, y'all proved me wrong. I modeled my surveys on those given to the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel back in 2012 because I thought the question was less leading. I simply asked if people would use "hopefully" in a sentence like "Hopefully, the treaty will be ratified." In the American Heritage survey, 63% of usage experts said that sentence was fine.
Well … just like Garner's poll, only 58% of my LinkedIn followers said they'd use "hopefully" that way. As usual, my Mastodon followers were more free-spirited, with 83% saying it's fine; and my Facebook followers fell in the middle with 62% saying it was OK..
Interestingly, while I was writing this up, I found an old LinkedIn survey I did three years ago that I had forgotten about. It had a slightly different wording, and in that poll, 70% of my LinkedIn followers said the same sentence was OK. This higher number comes from asking if the use is acceptable in Standard English versus the 58% who said they'd use it themselves, so the difference probably represents those who see that the use is widespread and won't fight it, but also don't like it and avoid it personally. Both surveys had about 850 responses, so there was no difference in sample size.
The Chicago Manual of Style also still cautions people against using it. They cover the topic in the "Problematic Words" section, and say that the newer "I hope" or "it is to be hoped that" meaning is here to stay, but they also say "many careful writers still avoid the new meaning."
So, as much as I'm an Associated Press girl and personally want to tell you it's fine to use "hopefully" at the beginning of a sentence to mean "I hope," I can't. Garner too had thought going in that only 5% of his followers would think such usage was unacceptable. But like his results, the comments on my social media and ongoing reservations from enough other usage experts mean that I still have to tell you to avoid it, at least when you're worried about being judged. I'm still going to use it in my own writing when it's warranted, though, and I won't change it when I'm editing my other writers.
When I last wrote about this in 2019, I predicted that in 20 or 30 years, people would be surprised to learn that it was ever controversial to use “hopefully” as a sentence adverb and will think we were quite silly for getting all worked up about it. Depending on how you feel about “hopefully,” you can take comfort in the fact that it hasn't happened yet, or dread that I still have at least 13 years left on the short end of my prediction.
by Natalie Schilling
Long before Artemis II captured our attention by taking humans farther from Earth than ever before, people have dreamt of exploring other worlds, finding life on new planets, and communicating with extraterrestrial beings. In fact, there’s even a subfield of linguistics dedicated to the study of alien language called xenolinguistics.
It may seem surprising that researchers could study something we don't know even exists. But there are good reasons to think about what alien languages might look like.
For one, in thinking about how extraterrestrial languages might work, we need to think about what human languages are like. One central — and amazing — fact is that human languages have far more in common than we might think. All of them are bound together by a universal grammar that underlies what turns out to be mostly surface differences.
For example, all human languages use a finite number of sounds (or gestures in the case of signed languages) and a finite number of phrase types (like noun phrases or verb phrases) to build a theoretically limitless number of unique communications, from text messages to philosophical treatises.
Humans are also able to communicate not only about the physical world but about things beyond our immediate senses, such as the past, the future, and imagined alien worlds.
And all human languages are passed down from parent to child. They’re cultural inventions, not instinctive behaviors.
Animal communication, on the other hand, is mostly instinctive and is far more limited: Animals convey messages about food, territory, mating, and a few other topics; and they convey emotions like aggression and affection, but that’s about it — at least as we currently understand them.
But an even more interesting question than what’s common to all human languages is why, deep down, they’re all so similar. A big part of it is that language is shaped by human cognition and biology — both their structures and their limits.
Our brains give us the ability to combine simple building blocks into complex sentences, and our bodies give us tools for producing verbal and signed language. And there’s no reason an alien species with a different type of brain couldn’t organize sentences differently — maybe as swirls rather than hierarchical structures — and no reason they couldn’t send meaningful signals via chemical, light, electromagnetic, or radio signals.
In fact, even on our own planet, there are beings that communicate through these kinds of channels: Ants lay down chemical trails, sea creatures send messages of aggression and submission using light and color, and eels and some other fish emit electrical messages, including navigational signals that keep them from running into each other.
In addition to advancing language science, thinking about extraterrestrial languages also keeps us entertained. Invented alien languages like Klingon and Vulcan have played a big part in movies and television, even though the languages are actually pretty human-like: They’re still transmitted via mouth, picked up by ear, and made up of sentences, phrases, words, consonants, and vowels — even if the sounds and words are weird.
A few invented languages reach farther — for example, the tentacle tracings of the aliens in the 2016 movie "Arrival" — but most movie languages are pretty human-like.
Hollywood has also tended to gloss over the question of how humans might understand alien communications. The crew of the Starship Enterprise uses a convenient Universal Translator; human-alien communication in Star Wars happens via a universal language, Galactic Basic (also known as English); and there’s a "babel fish" that does the translating in "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy."
Real-life scientists seeking communication with extraterrestrials, like those working with METI, the international research effort for Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, know that interpreting alien languages is likely to be far more complicated than science fiction would have us believe.
Some speculate that alien languages might be so different from any of our own that we might not even recognize them as language when we see them, let alone be able to understand or answer them. Beings whose brains and bodies are vastly different from our own will probably structure language quite differently and convey it via different channels, perhaps magnetic fields, odors, or even telepathy.
Another problem is that humans use human language to communicate about our earthly surroundings and our inner lives and to bond with fellow humans caught up in the same types of surroundings, thought processes, and emotions. We don’t know, and perhaps can’t even imagine, what types of distant worlds and ways of viewing them aliens will want to talk about if they ever reach out to us.
That being said, it may be that alien language will turn out to be more similar to human language than we might think.
After all, the more we learn about non-human communication here on Earth, the more we realize we have in common with animals: Bees communicate about distant food sources; cephalopods pretend to be other animals, or even plants and rocks; and some non-human primates do seem to lie — or at least conceal food sources.
Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the development of AI (which is rapidly becoming another non-human language we don’t fully understand), once noted that communication with alien intelligence should be fully possible, since all creatures in the universe are bound by the same constraints on matter in space and time, no matter what planet we may be from.
That’s a comforting thought for those hoping one day to communicate with galaxies far, far away — or simply to better understand our neighbors right here on Earth.
That segment was by Natalie Schilling, and an earlier version also appeared on Psychology Today. Natalie is a linguist specializing in forensic linguistics, sociolinguistic, and dialect variation. You can find her at Natalie Schilling Consulting and on LinkedIn. (Copyright Natalie Schilling)
Finally, I have a familect from Jeanette.
"Hey Mignon, this is Janette. I have two familects for you. The first is something my grandfather used to say when we would get to our destination and everyone would need to get out of the car he would shout, 'All out for the buttonhole makers' picnic.' And I never understood it, but we always thought it was funny.”
Thanks, Jeanette! This was a fun one because I think I was actually able to find out where it comes from! The Internet Archive has a transcript of what is described as a comedy monologue titled "Cohen at the Picnic" from 1919.
In it, there’s a scene on a train where the conductor announces a stop and the narrator says:
“All out for the buttonhole maker’s picnic.”
So were these a real thing or was it just a joke? Well, it turns out that jobs in the garment industry at that time could be really specialized, and buttonhole maker was a real job. They even had buttonhole makers' unions. So “the buttonhole makers’ picnic” could be a plausible union or trade picnic, and an outing that audiences at the time would recognize as a normal thing.
Now, it's pretty unlikely your grandfather would have been old enough to remember hearing the original in 1919, but I'm guessing it's something he might have learned from his parents — familects get passed down all the time — or maybe he heard an old recording himself because it turns out these recordings were really popular.
The intro at the Internet Archive says this:
"In 1912 Joe Hayman introduced in Great Britain a new phonograph character by the name of Samuel Cohen, and the response generated by these discs was augmented by their appearance in the United States on the Columbia label. These recordings of Cohen on the Telephone and the subsequent records in the Cohen series generated the most fantastic response of any humorous material during the period of acoustic recordings." It goes on to say the recordings could sell hundreds of thousands of copies and "There was a mad rush from the various competitors in the phonograph business to market various Cohen discs."
So it sounds like these comedy recordings could have been something that a lot of families had.
Thanks for the cool question, and I will also get to your second story sometime soon.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Morgan Christianson; Holly Hutchings, Dan Feierabend; Steven Schapansky; Maram Elnagheeb; Nat Hoopes; and Rebekah Sebastian, who has dyscalculia, which is basically dyslexia but with numbers.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
That's all. Thanks for listening.