Grammar Girl here, I'm Inion Fogarty, and today we're talking about starting a sentence with the word

hopefully and why that still gets some people upset. And then we look at what an alien language might be like.

For centuries, the word hopefully meant in a hopeful manner. For example,

the Scottish writer Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote in his essay, El Dorado,

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, meaning that enjoying the journey,

traveling with a hopeful disposition is better than getting to your destination.

Hopefully plays the role of an adverb in that sentence. It's modifying the verb travel, the same way adverbs like quickly or frugally would.

You could travel quickly, travel frugally, or travel hopefully. And traveling hopefully sounds

like more fun. But words can take on new uses over time. And in the 1960s, people started using

hopefully to mean I hope or we hope, as in hopefully we get to go on vacation this year. In reality, people have been

using Hopefully this way since the 1600s, and according to Merriam-Webster, it's been widespread

since the 1930s. But it became trendy in the 1960s, and when uses become trendy, they can

start to annoy people, and that's what

happened with Hopefully. In that sentence, hopefully we get to go on vacation this year.

Hopefully is playing the role of a sentence adverb. Hopefully means I'm hopeful that we'll get to

go on a vacation this year.

In that kind of sentence,

Hopefully is just like the sentence adverbs thankfully, mercifully, and fortunately.

You see, adverbs modify verbs, but they can also modify other adverbs,

or as they do in this case, whole sentences.

Hopefully we get to go on vacation this year is just like, thankfully, we get to go on vacation

this year, and fortunately, we get to go on vacation this year.

...