basic core rules
I've been giving some thought to the very polite argument going on here (not at all polite in other venues) over language changes. It is certainly the case that grammatical features like case are mostly gone and I agree that it doesn't matter a whole lot, since modern English is a distributive language (one depending on word order and placement), not the inflected language that Old English was and Middle English partly was. A sentence like, "Me come too" sounds like something a two-year-old would say; but even if, over the course of another 100 years or so, this should become standard usage, it's meaning is clear even if it's expression is inelegant. So I'm not upset so much by changes as long as a given usage is clear and unambiguous.
What really concerns me is that what we are seeing now is the institutionalization of usages which creep in out of ignorance and illiterate usage; viz., the indiscriminate confusion of lie/lay, infer/imply, and too many others to list. The result is a decrease in precision and clarity in the language. The reason English has more words than any other language is that most of them (not all, of course) have precise meanings which are different from all other words. If we keep on allowing the ignorant and lazy to stop recognizing the differences between certain words and make synomyms indiscriminately, by the start of the next millenium, if humans are still around and speaking English, they'll have to do it with the assistance of their hands, like the Italians, because one word may have 50+ different meanings because all the words with a single or limited number of precise meanings have disappeared.
While I'm on this hobbyhorse, let me also deprecate the vanishing use of the semicolon. We now have sentences with members of a series and subseries all strung out with commas because semicolons are now politically incorrect, thanks to the incessant whining, over the last 30 years, of the ignoramuses (ignorami and/or ignoramae?) who can't or won't take the trouble to learn how to use the semicolon.
