Newt Gingrich is preparing to make the transition from forgotten-but-not-gone to gone-and- hopefully-forgotten by dropping his presidential campaign next week.ĭoes one group the protecting pieces around the flag, or use them as a decoy, placing the flag alone in a hopefully overlooked spot? Of course, evaluative hopefully can modify a similar range of things - even in the New York Times:
"Capital, Capitals," a brief, chimerical text set by Thomson in chantlike lines with bare-bones accompaniment, curiously felt like an ancestor to Minimalist works like "Einstein on the Beach."Īs Albany took a belated first step yesterday toward enacting a bill to give New Yorkers increased police protection in high-crime hours when they need it most, the City Council curiously chose additional delay. That familiar horror-story scenario now seems curiously out of date. The campaign signs are curiously familiar, as are the Web sites and even the themes. This lends the whole production a curiously patriarchal quality. We learn of the Brady family's happy home life and of the sadly familiar sequence of brutality.īerger's ailment is sadly in keeping with his medical history.īut when he needed it most, in the touchstone aria "Una furtiva lagrima," it sadly failed him. … even when the book finally appeared in 1966, … it sadly did not receive much attention, … She was sadly predeceased by her beloved husband Camillo, … (I've edited my earlier posts on the topic to avoid misleading phrases like "sentence adverb" or "sentence modifier".) Here are a few examples from the New York Times where sadly and curiously as evaluative adjuncts are used to modify participles, adjectives, predicative prepositional phrases, and even verb phrases:Ī great deal of interesting repertory is being sadly overlooked.
The hopefully ex-controversy is about a word-sense difference of a kind that the English language happily tolerates.Īnd the same examples should warn us not to treat the evaluative senses of these words as solely "sentence adverbs". Curiously and sadly can be used as manner adverbials ("watched curiously", "sadly singing") or as evaluative adverbials ("curiously, no", "sadly, yes"), and both of these uses have been common for a long time, without one use driving the other out of the language. Let me note in passing that the examples of curiously and sadly underline the response to point (2). Point (3), however, merits further discussion. Point (2) is based on the curious notion that English doesn't allow lexical ambiguity, a premise that is spectacularly false in general, and has turned out to be false again in this particular case. How so? Unlike all those other sentence adverbs, hopefully can't be resolved into any longer expression involving a corresponding adjective ( hopeful) - but only the verb hope (e.g. Hopefully isn't analogous to curiously (= it is a curious fact that), fortunately (=it is a fortunate thing that), and sadly (= it is a sad fact that). However, one of the common rationalizations for this novelty-aversion does raise some grammatical questions of a more general nature.īryan Garner ( Garner's Modern American Usage, 2009) describes the controversy as follows:īriefly, the objections are that (1) hopefully properly means "in a hopeful manner" and shouldn't be used in the radically different sense "I hope" or "it is to be hoped" (2) if the extended sense is accepted, the original sense will be forever lost and (3) in constructions such as "Hopefully, it won't rain this afternoon," the writer illogically ascribes an emotion ( hopefulness) to a nonperson. And the genesis of the controversy, as discussed here and here, was clearly a rapid change between about 19 in the relative frequency of hopefully in the evaluative sense "it is to be hoped". Although the popular discussion of hopefully often refers to "grammar", in fact no general point of grammar is usually at issue - the (now moribund) hopefully controversy was about the usage of a single word.
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