"But once a form becomes classical it rarely produces much of lasting worth."

This may be true of arts, but it's not true of science. A clearly articulated idea does not lose cachet with age. Science isn't about 'forms' and 'styles', it's about accurately describing the world around us. Newtonian mechanics are 'classical' and 'old-fashioned', yet they still provide much of lasting worth to this day.

Anyway, I think to some degree you misunderstand my issue, which is about content. "this" is contentless. It is chaff. Noise. Mental overhead. It adds nothing. I would much prefer to read a rambling paragraph by someone with a poor grammar, spelling, or even knowledge of whitespace if that person is providing some content. Encouraging people to provide content and not just fall back on memes and tropes contributes to intellectual discourse.

All the examples you give provide content of some kind. Encouraging content promotes thinking about content, which in turn gives rise to more sophisticated thought - regardless of crossed t's and dotted i's.

Perhaps an example. I'm Australian, and our previously monocultural British heritage offered us wordplay as a way of life. Every member of society used a variety of forms of metaphor to communicate, and double entendres (not necessarily sexual) were common, as was the process of being able to say more by what you left out. As we rejected the WAP and became multicultural (this is not a jab in that direction, just an explanation), the complexity of this communication has markedly simplified - speaking in metaphor in public is now truly dead here as the great unwashed can no longer perceive the true meaning (which once was plain as the nose on your face). The influx of US media helped simplify things here as well. The art of everyday reading-between-the-lines is wasting away.

So we /have/ lost something tangible here. It's not about 'correct English', but complexity and subtlety in the way we can communicate. Things are much more stark and pinned down now - good for scientific work which should always be utterly unambiguous, but for everyday use not so much fun.

So this has changed. I know that it has to be this way, and it would be unfair to immigrants to force them to engage in communication that takes decades to master just to take part in public life (enough barriers as is). But it is not an 'enjoyable' change.

Perhaps a simile would be: imagine that if to continue communicating you were forced to use words no longer than three syllables long. It's doable, but it's constraining and you lose flexibility of expression.

"Real intellectual culture is closely connected to the marginal, lowly, and popular; it's pseudo-intellectual culture that wants to erect a wall against them."

I couldn't disagree more. I hear the 'erect a wall' part, but the marginal, lowly, and popular are the ones who ridicule those who show intellect or talent. In my experience, the 'good' intellectuals are those who can relate to the common person, but they prefer to be with people who can 'get' them, can converse with them on an equal footing.

And a prime example: "This." is lowly and popular, but real intellectual culture - not hipsters, but real intellectual culture - does not favour it.