Another voice
Hopefully bottoming out
A uberon Waugh
Leucate Plage, Aude, France One of the great lessons of foreign travel is that a man can survive perfectly well on the airmail editions of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph. There is really no need for any other newspaper. A result of this discovery has been that I missed the article in The Times to which Alexander Chancellor referred so eloquently two weeks ago. Through Mr Chancellor I learn that the actor currently offering his pathetic travesty of Evelyn Waugh to West End audiences was invited to reply to my own (fairly mild) criticism of his performance, and did so in highly abusive terms. For the life of me I can see nothing wrong with that. As an occasional practitioner of the vituperative arts myself, I might even have learned a trick or two — except that in the guttersnipe manner of the New Age, the wretched Editor never sent me a copy of this reply, nor informed me of its existence, so I still haven't seen it.
At the time of his appointment, I express ed my misgivings over the choice of Mr Harold Evans to edit The Times, fearing some complicated and obscure revenge against his mother country by Mr Rupert Murdoch, the Australian pornographer who had just bought the newspaper. An Australian who felt himself slighted in some way by London society might easily identify the old Times we knew and loved as his chief enemy, it seemed to me, and Mr Evans might just possibly have presented himself as the Voice of the New Age (circa 1965).
However, any profile of the New Briton, as illustrated by Mr Harold Evans, must await my return to Somerset and my law library there, since it is one of the less amiable characteristics of this little chappie that mockery or adverse criticism of any sort is liable to send him weeping to his lawyers in a frenzy of self-righteous indignation. Like Burns's moon he must wait a wee. If he wets his pants in the meantime, an army of legal advisers in New Printing House Square will help him change them, and even, sadly, a few journalists.
I had intended to devote myself this week to an essay on the art of eating bouillabaisse. Since Bernard Levin has been, as it were, gathered, nobody writes really disgustingly about food any more. I have returned every year for the last 18 years to this little-known watering hole on the western Mediterranean for no other reason than the bouillabaisse. In that time I have eaten it or its local equivalent in Marseille and most of the major Mediterranean ports, even in Fukuoka, Japan, and other parts of the Far East, but I honestly believe that nobody prepares it quite so well as Madame Jouve in Leucate. On the other hand, the art of eating it is easily described. The secret is to identify the inedible parts at an early stage, and leave them well alone. Then you open your mouth and shovel in the rest.
But was a treatise on how to identify the inedible pieces of fish in a fish stew really what people needed nowadays? And did one have any obligation to give people what they needed? I lay on the beach in the kind of stupor which earlier generations of writers associated with eating laudanum, brooding mournfully about the New Briton — the horrible banality of his opinions on every subject, the awkwardness of his prose, the vulgarity, ineptitude. and above all ghastly chirpiness of his leading articles — when I was struck by a thought which seems to explain much of what may have been puzzling us about modern Britain.
It all revolves around the New British use of the word 'hopefully'. For several years now people of education and sensibility have been recoiling from the widespread use of this adverb to modify an optimistic forecast without reference to any person who might entertain a particular hope — thus 'the train will hopefully arrive at five o'clock'; 'the government's economic measures are hopefully now working'; or even more ambitiously in the past tense, 'the current economic slough has hopefully bottomed out'.
Everybody knows what these horrible sentences mean. There is no ambiguity whatever, and since the first purpose of language is to convey meaning, this usage must pass the first test of language. Objectors next fell back on some notion of grammatical purity, urging that adverbs are required to qualify another word or group of words, and that in these usages no appropriate words are qualified by the meaning of the word 'hopeful'. The word 'hopefully' had been adopted in place of the substantival clause 'it is, to be hoped', and this was an abuse of the adverbial function, they argued, as well as a misapplication of the concept of hopefulness which can properly attach only to sentient beings, never to abstract ideas or inanimate objects, unless by some anthropomorphic whimsy.
Mr Alan Watkins knocked the first of these objections on the head, pointing out that traditional usage sanctiqns the disjunctive employment of adverbs to describe a mood or to pass editorial judgment. An example of this may be found at the bottom of my third paragraph, where I use 'sadly' to mean 'it is sad to record'. The second objection is easily disposed of: wherever there is hope there is hopefulness, and since the word `hopily' or `hopishly' has not been coined we must use 'hopefully' for any adverbial state of hope.
Most of those who followed the argument probably decided that the real objection to this New British use of 'hopefully' must be that it is used by the Wrong Sort of People, but Mr Watkins, whose genial soul is a stranger to the class antagonisms which afflict the rest of us, decided that it was perfectly proper English.
I feel he is right, but it was not until my bouillabaisse-inspired flash of clairvoyance on Leucate beach that I understood the true nature of the opposition to this linguistic fad or the reason for the violent passion involved,. including my own. Snobbery is not a sufficient explanation. The wrong sort of people are doing everything nowadays — not just editing The Times but re-writing the Bible, running the Government, advising the Palace — and we snobs can't honestly be expected to be driven into a frenzy, under these circumstances, by the misuse of a single adverb.
There are two reasons for it. Nobody is likely to object to my use of 'sadly' at the bottom of my third paragraph — although the journalists involved will not approach their task sadly, rather full of hope. Sadness is all very well, but hopefulness is not thought an appropriate emotion for intelligent or reflective people nowadays. That is the first reason. The second is that this state of hopefulness has overtaken the entire country, colouring and ultimately governing our whole perception of truth. To say that the economy is either recovering or not recovering may be equally misleading, not to say divisive. The exact state of affairs is either that the economy is hopefully recovering (if you support the Government) or hopefully not recovering (if you support Heath or the socialists). Will the train arrive at five o'clock? Of course not, but it will hopefully arrive at that time. Will vast government subsidies to Liverpool or Brixton make the blacks or white 'workers' there any more employable, or law-abiding, or content? Hopefully. Will government training schemes for young people do them any good at all? Hopefully, hopefully. It is this dog-like state of hopefulness which rules every public utterance, every government decision. It was this hopefulness which produced, in the Sixties, not only Edward Heath and Harold Evans but a whole generation of working-class whizzkids who were going to lead us into a hopefully glittering, hopefully classless future. It was this revolution of hopefulness which has reduced the country to its present abject state. We, the few reflective people who found ourselves left behind in the great classless disaster, can see that there is really no hope at all. The official state of hopefulness is no more than a pathetic veil over the havoc caused by our ruling, classless elite. But we may be able to comfort ourselves that the appeal of such people as Edward Heath and Harold Evans is hopefully bottoming out.
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