FOR years, language purists have rent their garments over the use of the word hopefully to mean ''I hope,'' as in, ''Hopefully, that will never happen again.'' Such use, they assert, arose in the rule-smashing 1960's. For many, it was and remains a sign of the decline of civilization.
But now comes Fred R. Shapiro, associate librarian at Yale Law School, using a powerful new computer tool called JSTOR that permits detailed searches of thousands of issues of scholarly journals back to the 19th century. And, lo and behold, the use in formal English of hopefully to modify a whole sentence goes back easily to the 1930's. He has found dozens of examples before 1960, including an 1851 citation that starts, ''Hopefully, not to say, certainly, in that time . . .''
Mr. Shapiro's findings will appear in a forthcoming issue of the journal ''American Speech.'' He has also uncovered a 1912 use of ''double standard'' referring to the gap between the treatment of men and women 39 years before the Oxford English Dictionary's first citation of it; a 1931 example of ''Native American'' for American Indian, 43 years ahead of Oxford's first example, and a 1914 use of ''solar energy,'' 58 years earlier than any other known use.
''The history of language is being rewritten because of these electronic tools,'' said Mr. Shapiro.
JSTOR, which is a nonprofit project to put on line forgotten and inaccessible scholarly journals, is likely to cause a great deal of intellectual history to be revised. For the first time, biologists, economists and mathematicians can trace the development of a question over the last century. And as they do their research, they are discovering not only new facts but something else: humility. Many new ideas are just old, forgotten ones.
Continue reading the main story''Mathematics has a long shelf life and there are important ideas to be picked up from papers of 100 years ago,'' said Cathleen Synge Morawetz, a professor emerita of mathematics at New York University and a recent winner of the National Medal of Science.
Professor Morawetz said an intriguing possibility is that forgotten computational problems abandoned decades ago because the technology was unavailable can now be solved. ''This opens up huge possibilities as people get used to the idea of accessing old journals,'' she said.
JSTOR, short for ''journal storage,'' is the creation of William G. Bowen, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Mr. Bowen, a former president of Princeton University, thought of the idea after a 1992 board meeting at Denison University in Ohio, where he is a trustee.
At the meeting it was announced that the university wanted to build a new library wing. When Mr. Bowen asked what was taking up so much shelf space, it turned out to be mostly back copies of scholarly journals. He suggested looking into ways to digitalize them.
DENISON never got its library wing, but the world got JSTOR.
The Mellon Foundation has put up about $5 million for JSTOR, which has been in operation for more than a year. The computer data base contains many of the issues of 67 scholarly journals in a wide range of fields -- from mathematics to the social sciences. All back issues of 100 journals are expected to be on line by the end of this year. JSTOR clients are mostly American university libraries, and it is starting to sign up subscribers overseas. So far, subscriptions are unavailable for individuals and commercial enterprises, but the hope is to make JSTOR self-sufficient. The Web site is:
www.jstor.org
''At first, people asked what the point of it all is since nobody ever searches for 30-year-old articles,'' recalled Kevin M. Guthrie, president of JSTOR, which is based in New York City. ''But it turned out that nobody was using older literature because it was impossible to get to and search. You had to stumble on something or it had to be cited by someone else. Now you can ask a question and search through the journals.''
Juliana C. Mulroy, professor of biology at Denison, said she has used the search tool to trace cross-disciplinary views of the Dust Bowl that were a precursor to the current debate over global warming. In the past, such research would have been enormously difficult.
What has struck Professor Mulroy is the way JSTOR will change the class boundaries within academia. ''I don't have to be at Harvard or Berkeley to have access to a first-class library anymore,'' she said. ''I can do this research sitting in my office.''
Mr. Bowen said he has been excited to hear from small colleges in the Appalachian mountains and from housebound scholars using JSTOR.
Some uses for the new files have been unexpected, Mr. Guthrie says. The William and Mary Quarterly was expected to yield little from its turn-of-the-century volumes, which were not research oriented at the time. But those issues are filled with family names and rosters of families' comings and goings in the early colonial period, and genealogists have found them a rich vein.
LINGUISTS say digital libraries like JSTOR will reduce dependence on searching through libraries.
''We still have people sitting around reading early books,'' said John Simpson, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. ''But digital data bases like JSTOR are doing a lot to fill in the picture.''
Informed of the new findings on ''hopefully,'' Sol Steinmetz, former editorial director of the Random House Reference and Information Division, said he was delighted. ''Even though there are plenty of sentence adverbs, like frankly,'' he said, ''for some reason people grabbed onto hopefully and wouldn't accept it. It's a lot of nonsense. I'm sure people will be very surprised by what is turning up. I consider it a pleasant shock.''
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