As Jo pointed out:

>As we try to converse with people from other countries more and buy our goods from the Internet the differences must be decreasing rather than increasing.

Indeed, my first thought upon reading these past several posts is that the internet has sort of jumped into the breach like a latter-day Deus-ex-machina to prevent the "Babelization" at least of English, at least among the literate. The way I see it is growing internet use will force agreement on meaning, and that agreement will trickle down. Individually, we may not agree with the agreed-upon definition, but, hey... whatchagunnado?

When I was in college I participated in a usage/lexical survey called The Linguistic Atlas of the South Atlantic States, a parallel effort to the University of Wisconsin's Dictionary of American Regional English. Back then, you'd hear "pail" on one side of the tracks and "bucket" on the other. Now, while you may still hear such local differences, they are certainly outweighed by the fact that I, for example, know what a scone is and Jo knows what a donut is. :-)

It would seem to me the language is, in fact, expanding. I think it's all for the best.

http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/dare/dare.html
http://hyde.park.uga.edu/