asked her whether
she meant I hope or in a
hopeful frame of mind
The first time we heard the word “hopefully” used to mean something it doesn’t mean was from the lips of a pretty woman whom we were wining and dining in a restaurant.
We asked her when she expected to move into her apartment, and she answered, “Hopefully on Tuesday.” We laid down our fork and asked her whether she meant “I hope on Tuesday” or whether she meant “On Tuesday in a hopeful frame of mind.”
She then laid down her fork and wanted to know what the hell we were driving at.
She confessed that she saw nothing wrong with “Hopefully on Tuesday.”
Rather than labor the thing, we shifted subjects; it is not our policy to badger pretty women. Since that memorable occasion, we have encountered this use of “hopefully” at every turn.
It is all over the place and has, we suspect, come into the language.
Time, always elegant in its rhetoric, appeared not long ago with this sobering sentence: “The Government would like to bring the case to a quick trial, hopefully before the end of January.”
Lacking a fork to lay down, we simply laid down the magazine.
EB White in Notes and Comment, The New Yorker Magazine, March 27, 1965.
Not sure about but lunch with EB White and his wife, Katherine Angell White, the editor who made the New Yorker Magazine into the New Yorker Magazine … sounds terrifying.
I am full of hope not to ever have to explain these essays to them.
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