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Am I imagining it or are spelling, punctuation, and grammar rapidly getting worse? For example, it's become very common to put question marks at the ends of statements to indicate uncertainty. No one seems to know how to spell led, no one, all right, or its (my phone autocorrects it to it's every time, which may be the reason). And the past participle seems to be going extinct. People are saying things that sound, to my ear, utterly retarded, like "should have went". The only one I haven't heard yet is was instead of been. But I'm sure that's coming soon.
Is this just normal language evolution or is it an actual degradation? I think it's actual degradation because I actually am finding it increasingly difficult to parse these grammatically off sentences. For example, the situations in which you can use singular 'they' have expanded to include specific known people and I usually have to take a second to figure out that the speaker isn't referring to multiple people.
Spelling has been stable for a long time, but now people are pushing up against the limits of what their autocorrect will allow them to get away with. If an incorrect spelling is the correct spelling for a different word, it's going to be used and frequently. Are people just spelling at the level of third graders and their phones are saving them from looking like complete imbeciles?
But it seems to be getting worse. Is it because the average intelligence online is falling as it gets easier to use the internet? I don't think so, because I see otherwise intelligent people make a lot of these mistakes. Maybe it's because it used to be that most of what we read had been written (had was wrote for my future audience) by professional writers instead of average people.
There also seems to be a general decades long decline in the quality of even professional writing of unknown cause. Compare a newspaper article or even worse a scientific journal article from today versus 70 years. The fact that even proofreading for missing words, spelling mistakes, or the terrible grammar of a Chinese scientist seems to be a thing of the past, suggests that the problem is partly one of demand. We just don't care that what we read is well written anymore. Why is that?
Use words is for take my idea, put in your head. If idea in your head, success. Why use many "proper" word when few "wrong" word do trick?
Grugg only make some linguist cry, not all linguist. Grugg say language like river. When river flows, take shape of land it flows through, change shape of land in turn. Prescriptivist tribe try to write shape of river on stone tablet, but tablet stay same even when land change and river change. Grugg think prescriptivist cry because know in heart of heart he try to do thing no can be done.
Grammar transmits information, but that information frequently (not always, but frequently) serves as an error-correcting code rather than a channel for additional information. Consider the following:
Even with pretty extreme destruction of information in the original sentence (e.g. randomly shuffling word order, or ignoring most grammatical rules while maintaining word order), you can still puzzle out what the sentence means. Minor errors on the level of using "then" instead of "than" every few sentences should have a pretty minimal effect on the reader's ability to determine what the author was trying to say.
I have an alternative hypothesis for why grammatical errors are aversive: flawless grammar demonstrates that either the author was smart and diligent enough to write the document correctly on the first try, or someone cared enough to edit the document. Either way, it serves as a costly signal of quality. Grammatical flaws demonstrate a conspicuous lack of that costly signal, and so readers develop a flinch response of "why am I even reading this, this is probably low value" whenever they hit a grammatical flaw.
Edit: Grugg had too much passion, use too many big word. Grug mean to say this. People tell Grugg "wrong words make hard understand". Grugg not believe people. Grugg think people see correlation, say causation.
Also you say is no prescriptivist linguist. Grugg agree now, but Grugg say that because prescriptivist tribe fight war but lose. Grugg point at Strunk and White.
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