You can’t drive down Main Street in downtown Lewiston without noticing the “Hopeful” sign designed by Maine artist Charlie Hewitt on the side of Bates Mill #5. To me it’s an encouragement to hope for the best. It has also made me wonder about the meanings and origin of the word “hope” and its offshoots.

“Hope” comes from the Old English “ hopian,” which means “to have trust, have confidence” or “to wish for.” It can be either a noun (as in the 1970 movie “The Great White Hope”), or a verb (as in “I hope it’s clear for the eclipse tomorrow.”)

“Hopeful,” by extension, means that one is full of optimism or is wishful about a future event. It can be used as a noun (“The young hopeful was nervous before her first college basketball game”), or more commonly as an adjective (“He is hopeful the crowd likes his speech.”).

And then there’s the adverb “hopefully,” which has long been the source of discussion among word wonks that continues to this day. What does it mean? What should it mean? Is its meaning changing?

Probably the best argument for maintaining the original meaning of “hopefully” can be found in the classic writing guidebook “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White: “The once useful adverb meaning ‘with hope,’” write Strunk and White, “has been distorted and is now widely used to mean ‘I hope’ or ‘it is to be hoped.’ Such use is not merely wrong, it is silly. To say, ‘Hopefully, I’ll leave on the noon plane’ is to talk nonsense. Do you mean you’ll leave on the noon plane in a hopeful frame of mind? Or do you mean you hope you’ll leave on the noon plane? Whichever you mean, you haven’t said it clearly.”

In other words, using “hopefully” at the beginning of a clause is using it as a “sentence adverb,” meaning that it’s modifying the entire sentence. Strunk and White assert that only the speaker should be full of hope. At the time of their writing, that was what Strunk and White decreed and that was the end of that.

But about a decade ago language expert Mignon Fogarty (aka “Grammar Girl”) told us that “The Associated Press has announced that its writers can now start a sentence with the word ‘hopefully’ to mean ‘I am hopeful that something will happen.’ . . . If you want to use ‘hopefully’ in this way, you can cite the Associated Press Stylebook for support. . . . On balance, it appears that the weight of opinion accepts the modified definition of hopefully, based on common usage and dictionary definitions allowing it.”

The AP Stylebook entry to which she’s referring instructs that “The traditional meaning is in a hopeful manner. Also acceptable is the modern usage: it’s hoped, we hope. Correct: ‘You’re leaving soon?’ she asked hopefully. Correct: ‘Hopefully we’ll be home before dark.’”

But is the usage of which Fogarty writes really a recent change in the way people think about the word’s usage or has this change been afoot for quite some time? Well, if we take a look at a couple old writing textbooks from my decades-ago days at the University of Maine, the public use of “hopefully” to mean “it is hoped” has been going on for some time, regardless of critics’ views on the matter.

My old Random House Handbook says “Many people resent the use of hopefully to mean it is hoped; they remember that until recently it meant only in a hopeful manner.” Another text from the time opines that “From an adverb with the established meaning ‘in a hopeful way, full of hope,’ hopefully became a vogue word meaning ‘it is hoped.’”

So it looks as though we’ve been given the go-ahead by the grammar gods to do with “hopefully” as we see fit – be it to modify a verb or even an entire sentence. Hopefully I’ve been able to shed a little light on this topic. I hope.

Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at jlwitherell19@gmail.com.

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