Maybe you heard, word nerds are rebelling against the Associated Press. The AP recently released its latest Stylebook and – among other changes – declared the word “hopefully” an adjective.<\/p>\n
I know! Time for pitchforks and torches, right? Writing on Salon’s website, Mary Elizabeth Williams explains this latest outrage<\/a>:<\/p>\n Perhaps you are the sort of person who wasn\u2019t aware that saying things like, \u201cHopefully, it won\u2019t rain this weekend\u201d has long been considered a grammatical faux pas. One hopes that you received a deeper language-arts education than that. \u201cHopefully\u201d is an adverb. An adverb, I tells ya, one that means to do something in a hopeful manner.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n [groan] We all know people like this. We may, in fact, be <\/em>people like this. At least Williams acknowledges why the AP made this change:<\/p>\n For decades, however, the word has also been a common shorthand for \u201cI hope.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And there’s the rub: because there are more than half a billion people using English every day, the language and its rules change. Like a river flowing over stones, common usage tends to smooth out the rough parts.<\/p>\n If you’re careful to use the correct version of “who” and “whom,” great, but you’ve probably noticed you’re in an ever-shrinking minority. And there are plenty of people who will point out that you – even with all your grammatical knowledge and discipline – don’t write or speak like English users did 100 years ago.<\/p>\n Beneath this urge to police the way we use our language, the most obdurate grammarians ride an undercurrent of something like elitism (if not the real thing). Holier-than-thou criticism abounds among these folk as they size up misusers of English. To me, a grammatical error is like using the wrong utensil at a formal affair. I don’t care which type of fork launches the mashed potatoes so long as they end up on the face of my target. (Yes, you could say this sentence contains a grammatical error if you also say “they” refers to “fork.” I say “they” refers to “mashed potatoes.” If you’d like to hash this out, invite me to your next formal affair.)<\/p>\n For her part, Williams says it’s not snobbery that’s causing her to dig in her heels over “hopefully”-as-adjective, it’s grief over our collective disinterest in the rules and our resulting failure to communicate properly:<\/p>\n Language keeps evolving, and that\u2019s fine and natural. Yet as it does, I\u2019ll still gaze hopefully toward a world in which we battle over our words and our rules because we know them so well, and love them so much.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n OK. Fight the good fight and all that. But our time and energies can be put to better use. The online writing collective “The Tangential” asks these questions of would-be grammar cops:<\/p>\n 1. Can this misuse be an example of the natural way that language changes over time?<\/p>\n 2. Can this misuse actually be a placeholder for something that grammar holds imperfect answers for?<\/p>\n 3. Is the misuse a result of the word being appropriated and changed by a counter-culture?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n