*MrsTime, I appreciate your first draft of your post. You have introduced a thesis and given several examples that buttress your thesis. Please consider these suggestions:
Paragraph breaks between items on a list are unnecessary.
Quotation marks around the items in your list would clarify your meaning. For example, write, A lot of people don’t know the difference between “then” and “than.”
Your thesis is supported very vaguely through anecdotes. If you wish to suggest a causal link between the lack of grammatical education and confusion between words today, you must demonstrate that these words were confused less often in the past, when “grammar” was taught.
Please clarify what you mean by “grammar,” as you are using it in a nonstandard fashion. Generally “grammar” refers to the structure of a language, not to the definitions of specific words. If your complaint is that words are used in ways distinct from their dictionary definitions, your thesis is not about grammar. If this irony is intentional–if you intend to illustrate your complaint by misusing a word yourself–the joke is currently too subtle to be effective and should be clarified.
Please revise your post and resubmit. I look forward to seeing your improved work!
On the one hand, I hate people who think there’s nothing wrong with using incorrect language. On the other hand, language is a living thing so it needs some breathing room, which the likes of Strunk&White certainly don’t allow for. For instance, I think there’s way too many capitals in English so I prefer to use fewer.
As for the original question: I don’t think it’s worse than before. On the whole, people are a lot more educated these days, and mass media have increased the influence of standard dialects/accents over regional ones, promoting a more shared notion of correctness.
However, it does seem that teaching of grammar and spelling isn’t considered as important as it used to, and these days people with weak written language skills use written language a lot, so the problems tend to be visible.
All of this seems to be fairly similar between English and Dutch; in both languages I see people make stupid mistakes that could have been avoided with even a modicum of care. (The incorrect use of it’s in English; the incorrect use of present tense conjugations ending with a d in Dutch.)
What I find curious is that apparently, grammar gets simpler / more regular over time. But then how did complex grammar rules evolve in the first place?
There are technological developments which blur the line between spoken and written language, like texting and email. There are technologies that, if poorly implemented, can change your correct English to something incorrect. Autocorrect mixes up its and it’s, for example (at least on my iPhone, it does).
I have read not that much, but enough of early US writers to state fairly confidently that the English taught then was not significantly different from what is taught now. Good! I would just as soon not have to take a course in 18th century American English in order to understand the writing of people like Jefferson and Franklin, and I hope conditions are the same 500 years from now.
This strikes me as an unproductive comment.
Take it any time you want.
I have no experience and therefore no advice to give you.
The ultimate purpose of language is to communicate. It is effective only in as much as what you intend to communicate actually gets communicated. Clearly if I were to speak in Chaucerian or Shakespearian English, I would be communicating with very few people. On the other hand, if I were to communicate in extreme Ghetto English (think Snoop Whatever Animal He Is Now and the like), I would only be communicating with a distinct set of English-speaking individuals.
I do think we need a standard English language, devoid of too many slang or trendy expressions, for official and legal communications where it is imperative that the meaning of the communication be fully understood. Whether anyone actually speaks such a standard English is another matter altogether.
Languages being experiential, they will all evolve as new events occur. They must do so in order to avoid becoming as obsolete as Latin or Classical Greek (at least in terms of a spoken language). We may bemoan the casualization of the language, but it merely mirrors the casualization of our lives in general.
I wasn’t the one who made the initial comment, so why would I attempt it?
I personally didn’t have any trouble reading what you wrote, and see no need to correct it. It isn’t how I would have written on the topic were I to write on the topic, but we aren’t the same people, so why wouldn’t we say things in a different way?
Have you seen how legal documents are written? Nobody is going to speak that way. If someone did, you’d know they were a robot, or maybe someone who learned English from reading such documents.
Even legalese English is going to need new words and phrases, though. It would be useful to have laws about online privacy and what companies can do with data about you that they collect online, for example. Your laws about that are going to be incredibly convoluted if you have to word them using only words that were used in 1950, and the meanings of words aren’t allowed to change. I’m not sure you could do it.
Even if you could, that might just make legal and official communications even more opaque to people who don’t deal with them on a regular basis. As anyone who has learned a foreign language knows, if you don’t practice regularly in a language, you’re going to lose your fluency. As anyone who has dealt with law knows, new circumstances are going to come up (from technological change if nothing else), and you’re still going to need someone to interpret how older laws might apply to those circumstances. You can’t just pass retroactive laws to deal with new situations, the Constitution says you can’t do that, and it would probably seem unfair to most people. I’m not sure a standardized English for official and legal communications buys you that much.
Interesting thing about legal language: Justice Kagen just used the term “way overstates” in one of her opinions. In general, she has been willing to use more colloquial language. Some people don’t like it, but I think it’s fine.