Indeed - "hope chess" is a lot better than "hopeful" chess - which is playing a move you know is bad, and hoping your opponent will make a worse one. People get this confused sometimes 
Although hopeful chess has its places - when you're dead lost and you need a trick to bring the game back. Hope chess, on the other hand, is a bad idea always, given you have the time on clock to not do it.
People are dancing around the definition, but not quite expressing it correctly.
On p.15 of Dan Heisman's A Guide to Chess Improvement: the Best of Novice Nook, he writes about the most common errors players make, including:
"Having bad thought processes - such as playing "Hope Chess" (making a move without analyzing whether you can safely meet any forcing reply)..."
In other words, you see what appears to be a good move and, because you didn't analyze far enough, you have to "hope" your opponent doesn't have a better one.
"Hope chess" will ultimately be defined by common usage, not by Dan Heisman. Much the same way that the entire world pronounces .gif as "Giff" and not "Jiff" even though the inventor of the .gif format says it should be the latter...
The more commonly understood definition is winning out because it simply makes more sense. Dan's version of "hope chess" would be more properly called "shortcut chess" or "I don't give a damn chess", or "narcissist chess", or something else.
I'm not as interested in what the common usage will be as much as I'm interested in the concept itself, a concept which seems to be as unknown now as it was before he came up with the term. Which is too bad.
I've had an account on chess.com for about 7-8 years, and I've rarely seen the term used correctly.
Ironically Dan Heisman's choice to give the catchy name "hope chess" to what he thought of as a major analysis error for many amateurs seems to have pushed his idea further from people's minds.
"Hope chess," as Heisman uses it, is not playing a silly threat or trick and hoping your opponent blunders, allowing you to e.g. win material or mate.