Some words you use at your own risk.

In the 1970s and 1980s in particular, beginning a sentence with "hopefully" would draw glares and sneers from purists. An adverb of emotion, they might patiently lecture, cannot be used to modify a whole sentence. It is the speaker who is hopeful, not the sentence.

Sadly, they were wrong. (See?)

And yet, though "hopefully" is a satisfactory substitute for the stilted "it is to be hoped that" or "one hopes that," and has been in widespread use in American English for more than seventy years, it is best avoided. Not because it is wrong, but because so many people have made it a shibboleth of usage.

It is, to use Bryan Garner’s label in Garner’s Modern American Usage, a "skunked term." The change in meaning from "in a hopeful manner" to "it is to be hoped that" is recent enough that traditionalists scorn it, no matter how widely it is current. If you use it, you will provoke them, and it is not in your interest to cheese off any group of readers if you don’t have to.

"Contact," the "hopefully" of its day, went through a similar process. It was originally a vogue term among business people in advertising and similar fields, and using it in the 1940s and 1950s marked the speaker as a vulgarian. As the means of getting in contact have multiplied, it has become innocuous. Only a handful of mossbacks would be likely to complain about it today.

Newspapers, including this one, were caught short earlier this year when "refugee" very quickly became a skunked term when applied to victims of Hurricane Katrina. The victims, along with their advocates and sympathizers, thought that "refugee" injured their dignity by equating them with impoverished residents of the Third World. Use of "refugee," though technically correct and eminently defensible, was abandoned in articles about Katrina, for the sound reason that a word that must be explained and defended at every use is a word to be avoided.

Editors, like generals, have to be able to see when it is most prudent to retreat.