Another Mistake not Made

A solecism that high school English teachers love to warn against is starting a sentence with “hopefully,” as in

Hopefully, we’ll all be in time for the meeting.

This is really just an instance of a fairly common problem, using an adverb when you need an adjective. You see it a lot in the news with “reportedly.” I googled that word recently and was chagrined to see how much it was misused. You can misuse many adverbs this way. Start some sentences with “understandably,” “supposedly,” “thankfully,” and “unexpectedly” for other examples.

Anyway, here’s someone who did it right! I put the correct usage in bold.

That possibility, one would hope, should weigh heavily upon the minds of the Supreme Court justices, who once praised those who “build and create by bringing to the tangible and palpable reality around us new works based on instinct, simple logic, ordinary inferences, extraordinary ideas, and sometimes even genius.”

Dignified sentences like this one are just as easy to read as ones that start with an understandably incorrect adverb.