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Earlier today, the Associated Press's Stylebook sent out the following tweet:

YES: This is wonderful news!We now support the modern usage! [Insert cheeky use of "hopefully" here!] Because among the ranks of the Grammar Rules We Knowingly Break Because Those Rules Are Stupid, the long-standing edict against "hopefully" has long held a place at the top. "Hopefully," the law of grammar has informed us, should be used only in the most literal sense: to describe something that is done in a hopeful manner. Used in the way the majority of English-speakers use it -- as a proxy for hope -- the word is, we are told, simply wrong.

As the AP put it in a previous tweet:

Got that?Do not use it.

The anti-"hopefully" mandate has been a bad grammar rule in the manner of all bad grammar rules: It doesn't track with the way people actually use the language. The ruleis completely out of touch with those it's meant to regulate. And while grammar guides, by nature, will always represent a tension between the vernacular use of a language and the normative use of it ... still, when everyone's just ignoring a rule, that rule demands amendment. We talk about language being a living thing; implied in the clich is the idea that, for living things, "growth" and "life" are pretty much the same thing. And the best way to let language live -- to let it grow, to let it flourish -- is to rid it of obsolete rules, just as the AP has done today.

So: Yay! The change is a small thing, but it's a reminder of a broader truth: that language evolves -- just like the Internet itself -- as a product of end-user innovation. Top-down guidelines and regulations can be valuable; but they are valuable only insofar as they reflect people's habits and assumptions. Language, like any good technology, must be responsive to the people who use it.

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Original post:
Grammar Regulators Concede to the 'Modern Usage' of a Word