I don’t think I’ve written the word Hopefully since my days doing technical support at the University of British Columbia. It is important for tech support people to be hopeful about all kinds of things. But hope in one hand…

We used it incorrectly. Some of us, knowingly. Always, we would write, “Hopefully these steps will resolve your problem.” Many clumsily constructed grammar sites will tell you that hopefully is banned at the beginning of a sentence because it is an adverb, that it ends with an -ly. The people who spread these lies don’t deserve to wear clean socks. We can use mercifully, or finally, or secondly, or quite a few other things as sentence adverbs without a second glance from even the grumpiest of grammar grandmas.

Hopeful, of course, means full of hope… who is full of hope? The… uh… the steps? Correctly, we might have said, “We hope that these steps will resolve your problem.” But that would make it too personal… it would make it too much about us… and really, you wouldn’t want to know what our expectations were, vis-a-vis your problem, nor would we want to lie to you.

To begin a sentence with some quality of hopiness, while attaching that hope not to a subject, but rather, to the sentence itself, to add an ambience of hope, we should look to what has already been established. Regret. “Regrettably, I ate the week old sandwich.” It is, in a general sense, regrettable that I ate the week old sandwich. “Regretfully I contemplated that week old sandwich, the sandwich which had cut my young life short.” Now on my deathbed, I contemplate that week old sandwich, and my thoughts are filled with regret.

And so the solution is that we must begin our hopeful sentences in this way: “Hopeably, these steps will resolve your problem.” Or perhaps hopably. Or hoppably.

Or, as I found myself doing, simply write, “These steps should resolve your problem.” It’s clean, there’s that tiny disclaimer contained in the should, but the sentence is more or less projecting confidence. This is the real reason to avoid beginning a sentence with hopefully. Hopefully is wussy. It makes your sentence weak, makes you seem wishy-washy, unsure. The real reason hopefully should be directly attached to the subjects, and never the sentences, is that the subjects are wussy enough to hope. We forgers of English, like Chuck Norris, know.

I have no idea what the point of this was. I was going to mention how I really really hate the word Healthful, and that even though in some fascistic way it’s the more grammatical alternative to healthy, usage both popular and historical would dictate that this ugly uncommon word and the people who use it should be dipped in concrete in sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

And now I’m going to make myself a healthy snack of late-night bacon.

Words of fiction since last time: not nearly enough

Written by Andrew LeBlanc 1 comment