Lost Causes

Ah, hopefully. It's been coming up in some recent editing, and is a good peg on which to hang a few musings about lost causes.

Probably not one editor in 20 worries anymore about "She'll arrive on time, hopefully." The old wisdom was not to use "hopefully" as an adverb in cases like this, because it can be read as qualifying the preceding action. "She'll arrive on time, in a hopeful manner." Better, curmudgeonly editors said, to write, "It's hoped she'll arrive on time."

The question is always when to decide that an old rule is really dead and can be abandoned. I'm almost (but not quite) ready to give up on "hopefully." The test to me is whether there's still anybody out there who knows or cares. As long as there may be, it costs nothing to get rid of "hopefully."

An even more lost cause (if there can be degrees) is the ancient rule not to use "convince" with an infinitive. Or perhaps it's not really lost, since Bryan Garner makes the distinction in his excellent and recent Dictionary of Modern American Usage: "In the best usage, one persuades another to do something but convinces another of something." So I'm still hanging in on this one, too.

Garner also expounds at some length on "hopefully," citing arguments for and against. But he ends by labeling it a "skunked term"---one so vexed that you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. "Avoid it in all senses if you're concerned with your credibility," he says.

Editors begin life struggling to know everything, and usually reach a point where they feel they've succeeded. They know not to use host as a verb and to say half-staff instead of half-mast when on land. Then after a few more years, if they're really good, they realize they don't know much at all. As I wrote once in a little book titled Dear Viola: "The hardest thing for editors to accept, as they wield their little brooms, is their helplessness in the face of chaos. The greatest editor who ever lived knew only a nanofraction of what there is to know about language and the world. Once editors realize this, they can put away their ulcer medicine."