Can "thankfully" be far behind?

That long, despairing groan you heard the other day did, in fact, come from me, upon hearing that the Associated Press Stylebook will henceforth accept the usage of the adverb “hopefully.” This is now acceptable instead of, “We are hopeful that,”  at the beginning of sentences -- as in “Hopefully, the city council will vote today on the ordinance.” I know, I know, too many pieces have already been written, pro and con, the vast majority of them in language much purer and more engaging than mine, but I’ve never been known for letting that stop me from venting.

The rationale for the update is popular usage.  Now my English ain't perfect. And I’m all for the evolution of language. Even my use of "And" to begin a sentence would have gotten me red-penciled in my early English classes. I applaud the new words which creep into our vocabulary every year. It's great when Merriam Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary formalize them and they become part of our language.  I like a word or two of slang in the middle of a formal sentence. It's like finding an unexpected sliver of jalapeno pepper in a casserole. It gets our attention and spices things up.
But, as an artist should demonstrate his ability to draw a cow that looks like a cow before he throws paint around with abandon and calls it art, a writer, a journalist, should know the rules of grammar so that when he flouts them, he does it on purpose, not out of laziness or ignorance.

 I don’t even know why the AP bothered to change the rule. We’ve been seeing this misplaced adverb in newspaper articles for yonks, along with other egregious misuses of our glorious English language – the language of the King James Bible, the Bard of Avon, Bill Buckley, Strunk and White, George Will, Beryl Markham, and Honest Abe.

 Can we at least acknowledge some standards of purity – in language, if in nothing else? Language is a society’s means of communicating its history, philosophies, culture, arts, laws, research, contracts, and, yes, news, which is history in the making.

Here in the United States, we have a Bureau of Weights and Measures, which ensures that when we buy a pound of fish or fifty feet of fencing or a16-ounce cup of French roast coffee, we get just what we pay for. Shouldn’t we have some standards to depend on in our language?

Winston Churchill wrote that, as a boy, he was not considered bright enough to study Latin or Greek, and so he was taught English. He credited four years of studying sentence structure at Harrow under a great teacher for his command of the language. Churchill’s speeches galvanized, energized, motivated, and gave hope to a nation during its greatest crisis. His written sentences, up to 100 words in length, are as solid and artfully constructed as the buildings at Oxford, and easier to read than your local newspaper. 

Please, since we can no longer rely on the AP Stylebook, can we bring back sentence diagramming? Or at least read Strunk and White?