Words define an age and former NBC News anchorman Edwin Newman accurately captured the 1970s Americana in two of his books-Strictly Speaking and A Civil Tongue.
The 1970s were a strange time, indeed. President Richard Nixon and his Vice President, Spiro Agnew, resigned their respective offices. Congressman Gerald Ford had been all but shoved into the White House. Viet Nam ended in debacle. The gold standard was scrapped. Inflation not only soared but seemed impossible to control. And all of this happened before a "born again" president, Jimmy Carter, ran for reelection on a platform of "malaise", "stagflation", "misery index", "hostage crisis", and oil companies "rippin’ us off."
"Hopefully" is one of the 1970s words that Mr. Newman writes about. He points out that people had given up saying (correctly), "I hope that something will happen." Instead, Americans of all educational levels began saying, "Hopefully, something will happen."
Technically speaking, the adverb "hopefully" does not modify the verb in any sentence that begins, "Hopefully, …" That is why it’s usage is incorrect. But from a psychological viewpoint, "hopefully" came into accepted use because it captured the funk and angst of the 1970s. The American people, after all, had been conditioned to expect bad outcomes ever since President John F. Kennedy was gunned down. And we have not elected a U. S. senator to the presidency ever since Lyndon Baines Johnson so adequately demonstrated why we shouldn’t.
Given the failed missions of all the presidents from Kennedy to Carter, it is not surprising that people fell into the routine of saying, "Hopefully, something good will happen."
Times change, and eventually, good things happen. I am very reluctant to say that good times came about solely because of Presidents Reagan, Bush (41), and Clinton. Each of these administrations had their brush with failure. The Democrats wanted to hang Reagan and Bush over Iran-Contra and the Republicans returned the favor by trying to hang Clinton over Monica. All was not pretty during the 1980s and 1990s.
Rather than a president, it was the sacking of our embassy in Iran that dramatically changed people’s expectations. They changed from hoping something would happen to making something happen; from the passive to the active, so to speak.
As we all know, our embassy staff in Tehran was freed just as Ronald Reagan took the oath of office. But it was not Reagan, the man, who brought about the hostage release. This was not a case where Gary Cooper, armed with a badge and six gun, was standing alone in the street. On the contrary. The Iranians correctly read that the America people were ready for change and that they had hired a man who would, if need be, use our full military power to make that change happen.
Contemporaneously, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher rallied Great Britain by defeating Argentina in the Falkland Islands war. It was Margaret Thatcher who best described the turnabout in 1980s attitudes when she said, "We have ceased to be a nation in retreat."
We are now a quarter century into the future. Yes, there still are negative thinkers among us who begin their sentences, "Hopefully, …" But the word that best describes our age is the frequently-used, one-word answer to even the most challenging of questions: "Absolutely!" And "Absolutely!" is spoken in a winner’s dialect whenever uttered.
As in the 1970s, we are paying record-high oil prices. The television networks report on the war in Iraq with the same anti-military bias that they did in Viet Nam. There are millions of hard-core Democrats who think the presidential election of 2000 was another Watergate. In essence, you do not have to look very hard to find enough negative sentiments to make one believe that we are reliving the 1970s.
But there is a difference in our age. People have positive expectations of all outcomes, no matter how dire the situation.
Witness the outpouring of aid after the Christmas tsunami in Asia or Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast. In the face of overwhelming destruction, Americans have opened their wallets and their hearts to the victims of these disasters. And between disasters, Americans volunteered their time to patrol the Arizona-Mexico border and search for a missing girl in Aruba.
We live in an enviable age. We believe in ourselves, our motives, and the American way of life. And that is a refreshing change from the 1970s.
