A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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vogue word when it first became frequent 30 years ago, it has long since lost any hint of jargon or pretentiousness for the general reader. The wide acceptance of the usage reflects popular recognition of its usefulness; there is no precise substitute. Someone who says Hopefully, the treaty will be ratified makes a hopeful prediction about the fate of the treaty, whereas someone who says I hope (or We hope or It is hoped) the treaty will be ratified expresses a bald statement about what is desired. Only the latter could be continued with a clause such as but it isn’t likely.
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continued objections against hopefully
You might expect that people would have warmed to hopefully once the usage became well established. But instead they appear to have become more adamant in their opposition. In the 1968 Usage Panel survey, 44 percent of the panel approved the usage, but this dropped to 27 percent in our 1986 survey. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the panel of the mid-1980s was less conservative than the panel of the 1960s, since it accepted once-condemned usages such as the employment of contact and host as verbs. And 60 percent of that same panel in the 1986 survey accepted the comparable use of mercifully in the sentence Mercifully, the game ended before the Giants could add another touchdown to the lopsided score. It is not the use of hopefully as a sentence adverb per se that bothers the panel. Rather, hopefully seems to have taken on a life of its own as a shibboleth.
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ambiguity of sentence adverbs
Like other sentence adverbs such as bluntly and happily, hopefully may occasionally be ambiguous. In the sentence Hopefully, the company has launched a new venture, you could construe the word hopefully as describing the point of view of either the speaker or the company. You can resolve such ambiguities either by repositioning the adverb (The company has launched the new venture hopefully) or by choosing a paraphrase (We hope that the company has launched the new venture). For more on sentence adverbs, see
adverbs, position of under Grammar.
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host
People used host as a verb in Shakespeare’s time, but this usage was long obsolete when the verb was reintroduced (or perhaps reinvented) in recent years to mean “perform the role of a host.” The usage occurs particularly in contexts relating to institutional gatherings or television and radio shows, where the person performing the role of host has not personally invited the guests. People first resisted this usage perhaps because the verb involves a suspect extension of the traditional concept of hospitality. In a 1968 survey, only 18 percent of the Usage Panel accepted the usage in the sentence The Cleveland chapter will host this year’s convention. Over time, however, the usage has become increasingly well established and has the useful purpose of describing the activities of one who performs the ceremonial or practical role of a host, as in arranging a conference or welcoming guests. In our 1986 survey, 53 percent of the panelists accepted the usage in the phrase a reception hosted by the Secretary of State. People are less inclined to accept host when it used to describe the role of a performer who acts as a master of ceremonies for a broadcast or film, where the relation of host to the notion of “hospitality” is stretched still further. Only 31 percent of the panel accepted the use of the verb in the sentence
