Summer,

I appreciate what you are trying to do in this post however, I disagree with a few things you are mentioning: 1) the idea that language changes are illogical; 2) and the idea that print media has “rules”. To begin I think I found a resource that would be particularly informative and helpful to you. According to the Linguistic Society, language changes for a few reasons: 1) the needs of its speakers change; 2) no two people have had the same experience with language; 3) language borrowing. These are just a few causes of linguistic changes they are definitely not a definitive list.

The fact that no two people have had the same language experience manifests in many ways primarily different sub-cultures or minority identities use language in unique ways in within their cultural enclaves. Moreover, you find this happens in academia as well. For example, rhetoricians have a specific discourse community and certain jargon signals to those within who is not a member of that discourse community. These occurrences lead to linguistic changes which have really no “strong negative responses” it is just an accepted factor for membership within different communities. Thus, I think to say that language change is an illogical occurence as a result to technological development is rather a large generalization. Arguably, linguistic change is what has allowed are language to survive and technology actually helps not hinders that surival this his how English has become a globalized language through the infinite communicative possibilities that technology and the internet have afforded us.

Here is an awesome resource on linguistic changes in English: http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/english-changing

Best,

Nat G.