There’s a fair chance that at some point you’ve been told that you’re using hopefully wrong: Purists insist that it can only mean “in a hopeful manner” and not “it is to be hoped that.” But who are these purists, and when did people first start giving this advice? More generally, there’s a lot of advice about English usage that we largely take for granted, from split infinitives to dangling participles, but where did anyone get these ideas in the first place?
We can trace back this history to sources much older than your eighth-grade English teacher by looking at usage guides. These books that tell you how you should write English range from the venerable, like Henry Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, to the modern, like Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. When usage guides from different eras or countries agree or disagree with each other, this tells us something about which changes in the English language were happening when and how noticeable they were.
But we can do better than merely comparing a few guides offhand. For the past two and a half years, I’ve been working on a database of more than 75 usage guides and 123 usage problems in the English language, spanning a period of nearly 250 years. My two assistants and I call this project the Hyper Usage Guide of English or HUGE database and it’s based out of Leiden University in the Netherlands.