I thought the OP was referring to using the singular ‘diocese’ when referring to many/multiple/numerous ‘dioceses’.
I’ll add noticing more and more people not actually pronouncing the possessive ‘s’ when the possessing word ends in an -[consonant]s. So like, “that’s Smithers’/Smithers’s* Malibu Stacy” is said like, “that’s Smithers Malibu Stacy”. It grates!
this isn’t about the written form and whether you should drop the last s or not, so don’t go there!
I haven’t noticed “assault” for “assaulted” but I have certainly heard/seen “text” rather than “texted.” I think it happens because “text” sounds like it could be a past tense form, along the lines of “vexed” or “flexed.” For someone who hears it that way, “texted” sounds wrong, as though one were doubling the past tense markers.
I have encountered this particular habit more often in the UK than in the US (I can’t speak to other countries). On another forum I belong to, based in the UK and with a huge membership, arguments about the text/texted controversy arise rather frequently. Some people insist that they could never say “texted.” They generally can’t explain why other than to say, “It sounds wrong.”
If it took you a year to locate your first example, I’m going out on a limb to suggest this is not the tidal wave of linguistic doom your OP made it out to be.
In a more serious vein, I suspect the whole thing is BigT’s contention of folks eliding sounds, rather than an effort to ignore declensions.
Coupled of course with txt-writing, where *every * orthographic / linguistic convention is sacrificed in the single-minded pursuit of using fewer characters before hitting [Send].
Not something that forms a regular topic of conversation with me, but that’s always been the standard pronunciation for the plural that I grew up with. Or did you mean that’s how people are pronouncing the singular?
When I was a kid in the '70s, I only heard “versus,” pronounced in full.
My guess as to what happened is that some people started to parse the phrase differently.
So “Ali versus Foreman” is “Ali against Foreman” - noun-preposition-noun.
But some people stated parsing it as subject-object-verb - “Ali opposes Foreman.”
So if it’s a verb then “verse” makes sense as part of a conjugation.
I think there’s a second thing going on in which people think it sounds wrong to repeat sounds. So Charle’s instead of Charles’s, tex’d instead of texted, etc.