In the News: Hope and Despair over AP Change

The most recent “AP Stylebook update” email, April 18, contained only one updated entry: hopefully. That is, the entry was an update to the AP-sanctioned usage of hopefully, which now allows the word to act as a sentence adverb.

For those who hadn’t followed the announcements or heard the echoes from the American Copy Editors Society’s annual conference last weekend, the AP Stylebook’s Twitter account, or online copy editors reacting to the news, the update may have been a bit of a shock. Given the amount of online and offline commentary I’ve come across this week, few writers, editors, or grammarians received the news stoically.

A timeline of selected reactions (I'm partial to Clyde Haberman’s sentence-adverb-packed response):

• “AP Loosens Up on Hopefully” by Andrew Beaujon, Poynter, April 17
• “AP Stylebook Seeks to Destroy American Way of Life by Accepting Hopefully” by Eric Murphy of the Editorial Board, Minnesota Daily, April 17
• “AP’s Approval of Hopefully Symbolizes Larger Debate over Language” by Monica Hesse, Washington Post, April 17
• “Hopefully, Someone Might Learn Something” by John E. McIntyre, Baltimore Sun, April 18
• “Language Wars: AP Accepts Modern Usage of Hopefully” by 500words, April 18
• “How Language Is Like Fashion: The Case of Hopefully” by Edward Tenner, The Atlantic, April 18
• “A 50-Year Tug of War over Hopefully Ends with a Shrug” by dbward, KUEditing.com, April 18
• “Hopefully Gets Upgrade at AP” by Lynn Gaertner-Johnston, Business Writing Blog, April 18
• “Hopefully, We Can Save Our Moral Outrage for Something Important” by Laura Moyer, The Red Pen for Fredicksburg.com, April 18
• “Is This the End of Proper Grammar? Hopefully Not” by Clyde Haberman, New York Times, April 19
• “The Audacity of Hopefully” by Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon, April 19
• “Hopefully, This Is the Last We’ll Write about Hopefully” by Andrew Beaujon, Poynter, April 19
• “Are Language Cops Losing War Against 'Wrongly' Used Words?” for BBC News Magazine, April 19
• “Degenerates Welcome” by John E. McIntyre, Baltimore Sun, April 20
• “AP Style Change: You Can Now Start a Sentence with Hopefully” by Michael Sebastian, Ragan.com, April 20
• "Hopefully, Everyone Will Do as They See Fit" by Bill Walsh, Blogslot, April 20

In the “Ask the Editor” section of AP Stylebook Online, the editors profess to be “amused by the reaction” and offer this answer to those upset about the change: 

Edited to add:

Of course, a number of word, language, and writing experts have commented on this "new" usage of hopefully even before the recent AP hullabaloo. See, for example:

• Grammar Girl in 2007
• John McIntyre in 2009
• James Harbeck in 2010
• Peter Sokolowski in 2011 [video]
• Stan Carey in 2011
• Annie Wei-Yu Kan in 2012