My degrees all were in philosophy, focused on philosophy of language.

Descriptive language is how language evolves, and the internet is the first real regional conflict area that Americans have really ever encountered without traveling.

History, you would have just been in your linguistic local, with your own rules, and differences could easily been attributed to outsiders being outsiders. The internet flattens physical distance.

Thus we have a real parallel to the different regions of Italy, where no one came understand each other, or at least the UK, where different cities have extreme pronunciation differences.

The same exists for written language, and it will continue to diverge culturally. The way I look at it is that language isn’t a thing, trapped in amber, but a river we are all wading through. Different people enter at different times, and we all subtly affect the flow.

I distinctly remember thinking “email” was the dumbest sounding word ever. Now I don’t even hear it.

It’s still fine to nitpick, we’re all battling in the descriptive war for correctness. My own personal hobbyhorse is how stupid American quotations syntax is, when learning at graduate school in the UK that you use single quotes and leave the punctuation outside of the quoted sections, which is entirely sensible!