(And Shakespeare clearly isn't infallible in other ways - his geography is hilariously bad and his history allowed clocks to chime in Ancient Rome, but it's bad geography and history, beautifully expressed).īut that was a different era, and such ramblers actually cited Shakespeare as an example of bad English, much as people today may complain that an MTV host saying "yo! We gonna pimp yo' ride sweeeeet!" is a bad example to children learning English today. You might think that today we could easily counter such foolishness by pointing out Shakespeare and the King James Bible use it, and you don't have to believe in biblical infallibility - or indeed believe any of it to any degree - to believe the King James is as infallible as can be when it comes to grammar, with Shakespeare as grammar made flesh.
I'll agree with the latter and allow the former as true much of the time, though it can be the graceless option other times.īut some went further and said that there was some magical rule against prepositions. Now, some would say that it is often more graceful to place the preposition before the object, or that it's a good idea to make sure that the preposition isn't so separated from the words it most closely relates to as to cause confusion. You see, adverbs modify verbs, but they can also modify other adverbs or, as they do in this case, whole sentences. In that kind of sentence, hopefully' is just like the sentence adverbs thankfully, mercifully, and fortunately. The idea that this means anything in English only follows if we allow that "means the idea in English anything" is a well-written clause (hey, the preposition's in the right place!).įollowing Dryden, some more people followed suit. Hopefully means I am hopeful that we'll get to go on vacation this year. This is OK, but it's not exactly what the original author expressed.Ironically, English is overall a much stricter language than Latin about word order, and it's precisely because of this that in Latin a preposition not only can't appear at the end of a sentence, but can not appear after its object (that is indeed the etymology of the word. In your suggested sentence, which is grammatical, you changed the wish from the present (helps) to the future (will help). So, "Hope this helps (you)!" is OK, but "Hope this help (you)!" has a verb agreement problem. Traditionally it means in a hopeful way: She smiled at him hopefully. You would say "This answer helps me." and not "This answer help me." because the subject of "help" is third person singular. There are two ways of using the adverb hopefully. I would expand "Hope this helps!" this way: According to these cranky holdouts, the only meaning for. I should have been able to tell that the clause wasn't an imperative because an imperative is usually a command directed at another person, and "Hope this helps!" is stating something in the first person. Note: Some last-ditch language sticklers reject the right of hopefully to be included in this list.
The second person and first person form of hope are the same, so I got a little confused because I didn't think about it carefully. "Hope for the best!" (You should hope for the best.)Ī declarative clause is just a statement, like: Imperative clauses are usually in the second person, like: Instead, indicate who is doing the hoping: I hope. To be safe, avoid using hopefully in sentences such as the following: Hopefully, your son will recover soon. Instead of deleting my answer, I think it might be helpful to explain why I should have known it wasn't an imperative, and pull out the bits from the original that were correct. Some usage experts object to the use of hopefully as a sentence adverb, apparently on grounds of clarity. "Hope this helps!" is a declarative, not an imperative.