Have you noticed that diction changes during certain periods in your life? That particular words bubble up to the surface of your mind more easily. And I’m not just talking swear words.
Despite the storm of big egos, swagger, and constant climate concerns swirling around us, I’ve noticed how I’ve been using hope and humble and their related forms. I was struggling with a tough health challenge for months and kept coming back to statements such as, “What a humbling experience this is.” “I am feeling so humble—so unsure, vulnerable, scared, and really quite fallible and human.” “I hope this goes away soon.” “I hope to be better by then.” “Hopefully this dose change will do the trick.” “Hopefully I sleep tonight.”
Hope and humble are common words—words we can handle at a young age. But with some diving and digging, I found they weren’t as straightforward or easy to use as they seemed.
Humble as an adjective is easy. Humble sounds like bumble, crumble, fumble, and stumble. It usually refers to someone who sees him or herself in a modest way and isn’t too proud or conceited. But, it can also refer to one’s origins—say if someone is from low social, political, or economic status. When referring to a thing, such as a humble abode, humble can mean that it is of modest dimensions or pretensions. Being humble means knowing we all have our limitations, shortcomings, and weaknesses. Being humble keeps us in touch with uncertainty and enables us to show compassion to ourselves, other people, and fellow creatures. In Garner’s Modern English Usage, the entry right before humble is humanness. It’s helpful to see the two close together. (Humanness made it into Garner’s because it’s often erroneously spelled without the double n.)
What’s interesting is humble as a transitive verb. A transitive verb is one that requires a direct object to complete meaning. In a sentence like, “This flareup really humbled me.” Humbled is the verb and me is the direct object. The flareup is a force acting on me. A force or forces make someone humble; the person somehow gets lowered in status, mood, ability or some other measure. Humility can come from being abased or debased. For me, months of illness pounded home the point that I couldn’t be everything I was trying to be. That the basics of my body couldn’t be taken for granted. At the end of the day, humble humans want to sleep well, digest properly, and hope that all our organs and systems function in a way that keeps us alive and able to love.
Humbled is often misused though. Think of when people give speeches about winning an award or being appointed to some lofty position. We hear of the speaker being “humbled by” the award, “humbled by the honour,” or “humbled by the generosity.”
Bryan Garner (of Garner’s Modern English Usage) writes, “The idea originally seems to have been that the recipient of an award, title or other honour feels unworthy of it. But often this comes across as false modesty, especially because people hear humbled and perceive it as being equivalent to honoured or cheered or buoyed, especially when the sentence is offered with a radiant smile.” Use of humbled in this way seems to give the impression that it means the same as feeling honoured. Garner continues and clarifies: “A humbling experience takes someone down a notch or two, or even further. Having awards bestowed upon you, in traditional terms, is anything but a humbling experience.” (Garner 556). Notice he’s writing in second-person voice. He wants to directly correct (and humble) those who misuse it.
Garner’s not alone. Arwa Mahdawi, writing for The Guardian, was even more forceful in the opening paragraph of her article about this troubling trend. She writes, “anyone who uses the word ‘humbled’ when they really mean ‘honoured’ ought to be immediately thrown into solitary confinement and not allowed out until they have read a dictionary” (Mahdawi). That made me laugh. And breathe a sigh of relief. Despite having been thoroughly humbled in the past year, and having briefly questioned my ability to think, write, and work normally again, I am glad that at least I was using humbled correctly.
My use of hopefully? Well, like most people, I hadn’t given much thought to how I used it, despite having loads of learning in place that should have prepared me for proper usage.
Hopefully is an adverb. It means to do something in a manner that displays hope. An example of its proper use is, “When Sara’s grandma asked about a snack, Sara looked hopefully at the cookie jar.” Hopefully is describing Sara’s act of looking.
However, a disputed but yet common usage of hopefully is when the word is used to qualify a whole sentence. For example: “Hopefully, my grandma has made some cookies.” In this case, hopefully is referring to the speaker’s feelings or attitude instead of an action within the main part of the sentence. No one is actually in the sentence to do the hoping action. In this use, hopefully is not acting like an adverb. It is instead a sentence-or-clause adverb or disjunct adverb.
In The Elements of Style, Strunk and White disdained such usage as “not merely wrong,” but also “silly.” Why not simply say “I hope” or “It is hoped” instead? They write, “Although the word in its new, free-floating capacity may be pleasurable and even useful to many, it offends the ear of many others, who do not like to see words dulled or eroded, particularly when the erosion leads to ambiguity, softness, or nonsense” (Strunk 48). It’s a matter of clarity and precision.
If we look at the second cookie example I gave earlier, we realize that hopefully could actually reflect the speaker’s hope or it could also refer to how Grandma made the cookies in a hopeful manner.
Garner weighs in on this too—for three columns of text! He concludes that “Clause-modifying hopefully remains a skunked term. You might well decide to avoid it in all senses if you’re concerned with your credibility; if you use it, a few readers may tut-tut you” (Garner 553). By skunked, he means controversial. The word can still raise a stink. (The fifth edition of Garner’s Modern Usage was published in 2022.)
Another relatively recent view comes from Benjamin Dreyer in his book Dreyer’s English. Dreyer seems a bit more relaxed on the topic and points out that the word thankfully is also used in a similar way, but doesn’t seem to draw quite as much stink.
Dreyer writes, “If you can live with ‘There was a terrible accident; thankfully, no one was hurt,” you can certainly live with ‘Tomorrow’s weather forecast is favorable; hopefully, we’ll leave on time” (Dreyer 159). Fair point.
Even though I can sometimes be a bit of a stalwart, a bit of an old-fashioned grammar maven, I have to admit that, while all of this controversy is interesting, I’m unlikely to break my habit of using the clause-modifying hopefully. I do hope, however, to at least be more conscious of my usage some of the time.
And hope is important. It’s something to hold onto, like a life buoy that’s been tossed out to you. Hope sounds like the plunk of that buoy hitting the water near you. When you say it, notice the exhale. Your breath comes from deeper down. Contrast hope with wish—what we do before we blow out our birthday candles. When you say wish, you slightly lift your shallow breath. It’s a thought that will be carried on the wind like a wisp of smoke. Hope seems to have a bit more expectation with it. It gives us a chance at improving ourselves, our situation, or the world.
I spent the better part of a year feeling pretty beat up and humbled by a couple of conditions, but in my better moments I reached for that buoy of hope for improvement. I’m glad the word-exploring, curious part of me is re-emerging from the turbulent waters of illness and its accompanying anxiety and depression. I like that part of me: the inquisitive part, the part that likes learning and digging and thinking. The part of me who, as a young student at Queen’s, didn’t mind trudging through the snow, down to Stauffer Library, and checking word history and usage in the multi-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary. I still like unearthing treasures that can change my thinking, affect my interpretations, analyses, and word choices. I like being a sort deep-sea diver of diction, an enthusiastic archaeologist, or a gardener grinning over some dirty potatoes that are ready for cleaning and sharing.
When hope and humble work together, we can accept our shortcomings, learn, and then problem solve and grow.
