hopefully

[Joel S. Berson]

At 4/4/2012 09:42 PM, Shapiro, Fred wrote:
>...
>I found that the usage so opposed by prescriptivists went back, not
>just "for decades," but for centuries.  The earliest example I was
>able to retrieve was by Cotton Mather (!) in
>1702.  Sentence-adverbial "hopefully" comes so naturally to speakers
>of English that it was present for over 250 years before anyone noticed it.

That Cotton used it suggests to me that it was in use even
earlier.  I have frequently been disappointed to find that some
interesting word I see in his writings had been used previously, and
he read a lot, owning I think the largest library in New England.

After this discussion I can no longer distinguish sentence-adverbial
"hopefully"from the other kind, but Google Books claims (when one
gets to its 7th page) about 61 results with Preview available before
1702.  Not too many for the experts to examine.

Joel

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org