{"id":1598,"date":"2014-07-21T22:25:11","date_gmt":"2014-07-22T04:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/?p=1598"},"modified":"2020-11-25T10:54:28","modified_gmt":"2020-11-25T16:54:28","slug":"nothing-is-true-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/definitions\/nothing-is-true-forever\/","title":{"rendered":"Nothing Is True Forever"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just about every week, GrammarBook.com<\/a> receives emails like this: \u201cMy brilliant ninth-grade English teacher drilled into us that so-and-so, but now you say such-and-such.\u201d The painful truth is that with each new generation the rules change.<\/p>\n

If you were in high school in the 1970s, it\u2019s a safe bet that your brilliant English teacher lectured you about the word hopefully<\/em>. Forty years ago this word polarized America. People loved to say it, and language snobs loved to hate it. The veteran TV journalist Edwin Newman had a sign in his office that said, \u201cAbandon \u2018hopefully\u2019 all ye who enter here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nobody claimed that hopefully<\/em> was invalid\u2014it was the way everyone used it that was unacceptable. The word\u2019s strict meaning is \u201cfilled with hope,\u201d as in Hopefully, I knocked on my true love\u2019s door<\/em>. But few used it that way. It came to mean \u201cit is hoped that,\u201d as in Hopefully, my dream will come true<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The authorities were up in arms for several reasons. For starters, hopefully<\/em> became a fad word, like today\u2019s awesome <\/em>or amazing<\/em>. You couldn\u2019t walk down the street without hearing it everywhere. The more people said it, the more grating and vapid it became.<\/p>\n

Beyond that, language scholars saw hopefully<\/em> as a cop-out\u2014no more than a glib way of avoiding \u201cI hope.\u201d It\u2019s intentionally unclear who is hoping in Hopefully, my dream will come true<\/em>. The word just floats there, unattached. Are you saying the whole universe hopes your dream will come true? Are you really that special?<\/p>\n

Those who weren\u2019t there can\u2019t know how passionately the sticklers despised hopefully<\/em>. \u201cIts detractors were operatic in their vilifications,\u201d says writer Geoff Nunberg. The odd thing was that the same detractors had no objection to other \u201cfloating\u201d adverbs, such as thankfully<\/em>, happily<\/em>, and frankly<\/em>.<\/p>\n

For decades the venerable Associated Press Stylebook<\/em> said in its entry on hopefully<\/em>: \u201cIt means in a hopeful manner. Do not use it to mean it is hoped, let us hope or we hope.\u201d So imagine the surprise of many who opened the 2012 edition and found this: \u201cThe traditional meaning is in a hopeful manner. Also acceptable is the modern usage: it\u2019s hoped<\/em>, we hope<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, after all these years, the uproar is a dim memory, and the word is accepted in most quarters (although you will never see a floating hopefully<\/em> in this space).<\/p>\n

So much for that English teacher\u2019s scolding in 1979. To the dismay of traditionalists, a language\u2019s rules are bound to change when enough people refuse to obey them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just about every week, GrammarBook.com receives emails like this: \u201cMy brilliant ninth-grade English teacher drilled into us that so-and-so, but now you say such-and-such.\u201d The painful truth is that with each new generation the rules change. If you were in high school in the 1970s, it\u2019s a safe bet that your brilliant English teacher lectured […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,10,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adjectives-adverbs","category-definitions","category-effective-writing"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}