I felt the same way when I first heard someone say "lol" out loud :-) What does that even mean? What is the world coming to if instead of actually laughing out loud you just say "lol"?

I really don't know. I read an interview with Haruki Murakami. He said that when he first started writing, he would write in English (which, at the time, he was very bad at) and then translate it into Japanese. He did that so that he was forced to write very simple sentences that anyone could understand. There is a reason is an insanely popular author.

People these days don't read literature, generally speaking. Actually, let's back that up. What I mean is that most people spend a lot more time reading than most people used to do 100, or 50 or even 20 years ago. However, they read tweets and facebook postings and instagram chats. They do it constantly. I've recently seen a guy riding a motorised scooter in the middle of Moorgate station while messaging on his mobile phone (with noise cancelling headphones on to boot)! This kind of writing is aimed at that guy!

Yeah, I hate that guy too (he almost killed me), but that's the market these days. They want close, intimate, personal text that looks like it might have come from their best friend. And while I'm being tongue in cheek, it's just true that modern society is getting less formal and more intimate. At the same time, people are reading vastly more content from non-professional writers than they are from professional writers. It changes what they look for and expect in an article.

I used to teach English as a foreign language. One of the things I realised very quickly is that the grammar rules you are taught in school are actually wrong. Those rules are called the "prescriptive grammar" for a language and they don't model the language perfectly.

A good example of this is use of "to be" with a participle. If I say "I am going", what is the meaning of the word "going"? How does it compare to "I am blue"? What if I said, "I am to go"? What do the words "to go" mean in this context? How does that compare to sentences like "Going is good" and "To go is good"? In all of these sentences, where is the verb? What if I told you that "to be" in all of these sentences is not a verb, but actually a "copula" -- a word that equates one thing to another. So "I am blue" just equates "I" and "blue". "I am going" equates "I" and the act of going. "I am to go" equates "I" and the necessity of going. "Going is good" equates an actual act of going with goodness. "To go is good" equates the general concept of going with goodness. But our prescriptive grammar says that we can't have a sentence without a verb and so "is going" is somehow a verb.

That grammar that we learn, is not the construction of the language. It is a set of normative rules that let us speak so that we don't sound unintelligible. However, prescriptive grammar always lags behind colloquial usage by necessity. Unlike French, we don't have an academy that tells us how we must talk. Instead, we talk how we want to talk and then we update our grammar to fit the weird rules that we started using when we were talking.

We don't write like we did in Shakespeare's time. We don't write like we did even 100 years ago. However, the change in writing form is morphing faster and faster these days because people are communicating more and more through writing. There is nothing that can be done about it.

Although, I hate it too. Because I'm old. LOL!