Why is "hopefully" bad English? -- was "Re: assumably"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Sep 26, 2004, at 1:42 PM, Gerald Cohen wrote:

> I've always been puzzled about "hopefully" being dismissed as bad
> English.
> The German equivalent is "hoffentlich," which is not only perfectly
> acceptable but seems to be used more than "ich hoffe" (= I hope).

see the nice discussion of sentence-modifying "hopefully" in MWDEU.
the conclusion: "There was never anything really wrong with it; it was
censured, as Bolinger 1980 notes, because it was new [its use expanded
rapidly around 1960], and it is not new any more."  it's a classic case
of popular innovative forms being censured ("What is newly popular will
often be disparaged", as MWDEU puts it), even when they're perfectly
reasonable.

to tie this back to "supposably" and "assumably", one writer (John
Bremner, Words on Words, 1980) has asserted that "hopably" or
"hopeably" has been used as a substitute for sentence-modifying
"hopefully", but this word seems to be nonexistent, except in
discussions of substitutes for the evil "hopefully".  ("hopingly"
actually has a few cites, but not since 1883, according to MWDEU.)

arnold