hopefully

[Jonathan Lighter]

If Cotton Mather used it, I'm surprised that not only is the earliest OED
ex. from 1932, but in addition there;s nothing else till 1965.

GB turns up an excellent ex. from the Canadian Parliament in "1899," except
that one look at the snippet shows it must really be from the late 20th C.
 Ditto for one from "1889." And a third from "1888."

Here's a real one from the USA:

1904 Joseph Nimmo, Jr. _Certain Paramount Political Issues_ (Washington,
D.C.: Darby Ptg. Co.) 11: Those patriotic men, in the past, have been able
to thwart the purposes of populism in Congress, and hopefully they will be
able to defeat all such designs in the future.

Further exx. are nearly nonexistent until more modern times.  That suggests
to me that the sense "it is to be hoped" really is a late-19th C.
development (as offbeat in its day as positive "anymore"), and that the
rule against it was formulated only after it had become common.

Surely the taboo had far more to do with novelty than with any real fears
of "misunderstanding."

Just because sentence-initial "hopefully" *could have been* in existence
for 200 or more years doesn't mean that it was, or that it had much
currency in any case before ca1950.

JL



On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 1:14 PM, James Harbeck <jharbeck at sympatico.ca> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       James Harbeck <jharbeck at SYMPATICO.CA>
> Subject:      Re: hopefully
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> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> There's also an article on this on the Nasty Guide to Nice Writing:
> http://nastyguide.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/sentence-adverbs/
>
> James Harbeck.
>
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