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No disrespect intended, but your statement is what every fauxstalgia snob says about whatever time period they grew up in as compared to the present.
You can find angry letters from any period in history that you like, complaining about how language has gone to hell and nobody cares anymore.
A simple plan for spelling reform that is often, although perhaps erroneously, attributed to Mark Twain:
http://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm
I understand that position. But I think there is a difference between development of language (and I do find many neologisms to be perfectly cromulent, in that they do embiggen our ability to express ourselves) and misuse of existing language. The example of ‘then’ and ‘than’ is an especially glaring example. As is brakes and breaks. And cue and queue. The point with those is that eventually we lost a useful word simply because of misuse.
And the transition from past (‘correct’ 
) preposition usage to newer usage (much of which - as @Frederic says, and welcome to BB by the way - is driven by lack of diligence and zero editing oversight) WILL result in misunderstandings and errors. Imagine if NASA specified a component that required A to be built on B but someone wrote ‘off of’ and someone managed to interpret that as assembling B not ON A but, say, adjacent to it. It could end up with a disaster as bad as the metric/imperial cock-up which did lead to real disaster.
So you can dismiss me (us?) as merely complaining about how language has gone to hell and nobody cares (by implication being out of date and out of sync with the times and the development of language) if you wish. But there are degrees of hell and some lines that are worth drawing and trying to defend.
Add me to the list, when I say that the arguments here about whether it should be “on” instead of “off of” hurt my brain. Everyone seems to accept “off of”, but the “of” is completely unnecessary. It’s just “off”. “Off of” was a mark of the uneducated in the long-ago days of my youth.
In conclusion, get offa my lawn.
I wasn’t dismissing the entire idea of trying to preserve useful language for effective communication. I was dismissing the attitude of “everything was better when I was growing up”.
Fair enough (though I think Frederic was giving us that as backdrop not rationale).
I agree about ‘off of’, in general, but if it is built OFF, by definition IT IS NOT BUILT ON!
I think you are burying the lede here…
Built from the fondations up…
Fondations? 
C’est un peu Français, n’est-ce pas?
But what has it been buried under? Or on? Or off of?
Time for this, I suspect.
No, I failed French (and Latin)… I can speak Italian fairly well though 
That is mostly due to my horrible typing.
Another reason things got compressed a lot was that, until large-scale industrial pulp-milling occured in the 19th Century, paper was an expensive luxury good.
Mainstream Media – pah
Wow! I think that was quite a leap to make. What’s better and what’s worse than it was 60 years ago would be an interesting topic to discuss. However, I think I can make a pretty good case that the written word has suffered during that time. And as a further example, back then one would never find a reputable publication substituting “should’ve” with “should of” as is all too common today.
It’s all William the Bastard’s fault for conquering England and introducing a Latin/Greek baseline to the language. Also he is the reason property and inheritance laws are so goofy.
Do the Normans count as immigrants?
It absolutely ALL is!! (Which is to say it’s not its. Tch!)
Too effing right they do did do.
(Speaking as a fully paid up member of the Reinvade and Conquer France Society.)
Also, and this is something they didn’t go into in the article, in English those words were sometimes (in particular the problematic “gh” words) spelled with different letters that we no longer use - i.e. “yogh” and “Irish/insular g” - that matched the different pronunciations. That seems like something else that printing caused - or at least hastened.
They do go into that in the actual article. But to sum up: the English language was in a period of great transformation and tumult, coincidentally, when printing was introduced (in part because it was coming out of a period where English simply had stopped being written altogether); there was no central body, no academy deciding what was proper English; printing - and the printers - came from Europe and many were not native English speakers, so they imported their own rules for what words should look like, on top of everything else.
Show me one.
You see it a lot in internet comments but I have never seen that aggravating mistake in print.
