Who'd a thunk it?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Sat, 2 Jul 2005 04:05:15 -0700, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM> wrote:
>>Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
>>>At 7:44 PM -0400 7/1/05, sagehen wrote:
>>>As for the first point, it does seem to me that saying "hopefully" in
>>>order to spread the blame around a bit is a lot like choosing a passive
>>>construction to avoid coming right out with a forthright statement. It
>>>has a kind of mealy-mouthed quality.
>>
>Do you also avoid "certainly", "probably", "regretfully",
>"fortunately", "apparently", "evidently","luckily", "sadly",
>"happily", and other sentence adverbs which similarly deflect the
>role of the assessor? Giving these up in favor of "I am certain",
>"I think", "I regret", "it seems to me", etc. trades the
>"mealy-mouthed" adverbs in for egocentric parentheticals...
>
>How about "thankfully" ?

Or "bluntly", "briefly", "frankly", "roughly", "seriously", "strictly"...

The alt.usage.english FAQ has a decent entry on this:

http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxhopefu.html

One point I'd question-- the entry says that "apparently" and Larry's
other examples "can be converted into 'It is apparent that', etc.", but
that "hopefully", "thankfully", etc. "are used in a way that instead must
be construed with an ellipsis of 'to speak' or 'speaking'".  I think it's
possible that "hopefully" and "thankfully" could have *once* been
construed as "it is hopeful/thankful that", based on these OED
definitions:

-----
hopeful
2.a. Causing or inspiring hope; giving promise of success or future good,
‘promising’: said of a person or thing on which one's hope is set, or
concerning which hope is entertained.
-----
thankful
2.a. Worthy or deserving of thanks, gratitude, or credit; pleasing,
acceptable, grateful, agreeable.
-----

Of course, the application of "hopeful"/"thankful" to things worthy of
hope/thanks is now largely obsolete, so there may be no connection to the
20th-century usage of the adverbial forms.

For a discussion of other adjectives that can refer either to the person
experiencing an emotional state or to the cause of that state, see this
Language Log post:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002217.html


--Ben Zimmer