A few years ago, the AP news agency announced that they were changing their stance on a certain issue in the use of English:
Hope you’ll appreciate this style update, published at #aces2012. We now support the modern usage of the word hope: hope is so, we hope.
– APStylebook (@APStylebook) April 17, 2012
The statement had an immediate and disastrous impact. Mature men and women cry, bitterly reconsidering their life choices. Children feel deep and inexplicable grief, a feeling disproportionate to their limited experience of hope and loss. Even dogs feel angry, even though they can’t understand why.
‘Hope’ has been used as an adverb in sentences since at least 1648. Hopefully that’s good enough for you.
But what could this “modern usage” be? hope To be? Could it be, as was the case with literally, a word in which the word carries a meaning almost the opposite of its commonly accepted meaning? Does it have anything to do with millennials? Is it the one in which the word loses all meaning? Not necessarily. That’s the feeling of hope which we define as “it is hoped: I hope: we hope.”
OH. That thing. As in “Hopefully people will stop degrading the English language and we can all go back to writing like Chaucer did.”
The problem some people have with the previous sentence is hope should rather be limited to the meaning “hopefully” and write that “in a way that hopefully people will stop devaluing the English language” doesn’t make much sense. However, this is not the only way hope functions, no matter how much people want it to be different.
hope can be used as a sentence adverb (sometimes called ) loose adverb). ONE sentence adverb modify the meaning of the entire statement (as opposed to adverb of mannermodify a word or phrase).
“At the church!” she cried out; “surely you don’t think we’re too old-fashioned to go to church!” -“Crabtree’s Complaint,” The spirit of public journals1803
In the quote on the adverb sure is not intended to indicate that a person thinks about something “with certainty”; it qualifies the entire statement and means “certainly” (another word often used as an adverb in a sentence). We have a large number of adverbs that perform this function (very lucky, ideal, Fortunatelyetc.), but few, if any, of them have aroused such anger levels as hope Have. Why is this?
One possibility is that this usage is considered modern, and there is such a curious and seemingly unshakable feeling that many consider the change of language to be evidence of some moral degradation. and wisdom. But the use hope this way is not modern, unless you apply a definition of modern which means “to happen at any time after Shakespeare.” The earliest “modern usage” of hope which we know from the middle of the 17th century.
This speech has fully accepted the Judgment of all those who have seen it so far, and hopefully it will have some effect on the people who run the Works of this Country, if Danger of this Last Chaos, did not use their full strength and Attention, to save us from the Unexpected Shipwreck. —Samuel Hartlib, Discover more about the Public Address Office for Accommodation1648
It should be noted that the use of hope as a sentence adverb was not common until quite recently (although there were occasional instances of it throughout the 18th and 19th centuries). The use of hope as an adverb in a sentence has proliferated in the mid-20th century, prompting some defenders of the language to issue rules, warnings, and advice that it is something to avoid.
None of these seem to have much effect, since the adverb in the sentence uses hope has continued to develop. Some manuals have adopted the new meaning, while others still feel that it is incorrect. Our own Dictionary using English offers the following advice: “You can use it if you need to, or avoid it if you don’t like it.”
Categories: Usage Notes
Source: vothisaucamau.edu.vn
