Aha, another opportunity for me to point out that Bill Bryson is not a reliable source for information nor an authoritative source for anything at all, including opinions about the English language.
You know, Lead was always my favorite Metal Man. Sure, he wasn’t as showy as some of the others, but you could depend on him in a pinch.
He would be there for you if your mechanical pencil ran out of…
Perhaps not. But I still think that some accent marks, here and there, would help with the pronunciation of certain, less-common English words.
I have no objection to diacritics. I still subscribe to the New Yorker, which to my delight still prints “cooperate” as “coöperate.”
In traditional journalistic jargon, the beginning of a story was the “lede” and the spacing between printed lines was “ledding.” Both to avoid the ambiguity of “lead.”
So homophones and homonyms cause a lot of trouble for writers if they’re not just super tuned in to the whisperings of the grammar spirits.
Next you’ll be telling me water is wet, or that fire burns.
Not sure how “traditional” something is in language when it was invented in the 1950s (first documented usage was 1951).
I endorse the OP’s pitting. It bothers me when I read a published article that presumably was subject to professional editors and yet misuses the word “lead” as past tense. Gah!
That’s more than one generation of journalists. Good enough for me. Do you really want to nitpick the scope of “traditional”?
Pedantry on the Dope? Unimaginable.
I clicked two of OP’s links. One led to a use of ‘lead’ in infinitive form where ‘led’ would have been quite incorrect. The other was a sentence where either past or present tense would be proper.
OP Failure.
The AP Stylebook has not “stopped capitalizing ‘internet’” as the AP Stylebook is not a person and it does no writing. If one looks within it, however, one finds that it recommends, as a matter of style, the use of the lower case in “internet”. But “years ago” was actually only since June, 2016, and in terms of worldwide usage, it was a bit ahead of the curve. The usage is changing, but according to this the capitalized form was still predominant in the US as of 2016, while the lower-case form has been much more widely used in the UK. Notwithstanding the AP Stylebook, it seems to be another one of those US-UK distinctions. There is perhaps no publication more obsessive about style – sometimes to the point of pedantry – than the New Yorker magazine, where “Internet” and “Web” are both capitalized.
I’m just glad that no one has to remind me – as they once did – that nobody calls it the Arpanet anymore! 
But “MF” is an acronym, which is a special kind of abbreviation that is typically capitalized. Suppose you disagreed with the first post in this thread. Would you say “the OP is a POS”, or “the op is a pos”?
“MF” is not an acronym. Neither is “OP” or “POS.”
“Arpanet” is an acronym.
A bit nitpicky and not quite right, though a pedant would have called those terms “initialisms”:
Some people feel strongly that acronym should only be used for terms like NATO, which is pronounced as a single word, and that initialism should be used if the individual letters are all pronounced distinctly, as with FBI. Our research shows that acronym is commonly used to refer to both types of abbreviations.
Which two did you click?
Yeah, exactly. Three years ago is, in fact, “years ago.” Should I have instead said “last year”?
I see “acronym” defined as being formed from the first letters of other words, pronounced as a single word in its own right. As such, MF and POS are in fact acronyms, whereas Arpanet is actually not (“Advanced Research Project Agency NETwork”).
No, what you should NOT have said is “Come join us in the present day, grandpa! The AP Stylebook stopped capitalizing “internet” years ago, much like nobody capitalizes “phonograph” anymore either.” The implication that what the AP Stylebook set out as their standard somehow applies to the whole world obviously isn’t true, and especially not in the US, where you appear to be residing, and where the opposite convention still prevails.
MF and POS are only “words in their own right” if you pronounce them phonetically, like “mmph” and “paws”. If you pronounce them as separate letters they’re simply initials.
NATO and NASA are acronyms while CIA and UPS aren’t, by your stated definition.
Of course you’re going to find different opinions from different sources. The Wikipedia article on acronyms seems to do a pretty good job of summing it up.
“There are no universal standards for the multiple names for such abbreviations or for their orthographic styling.”
So this is kind of like arguing which pizza toppings are “best”. (The answer is of course pepperoni and extra cheese.)
An acronym is an abbreviation that is pronounced like a word in its own. Laser, scuba, radar, UNICEF, Nato, AIDS, Patriot Act are acronyms. It’s a type of abbreviation.
Another type of abbreviation is an initialiam, which is pronounced as a series of individual letters. FBI, CIA, NBC, are initialiams.
For all intensive purposes their the same.
I assume you mean intensive porpoises.