[jerf]

When I was in high school, I read a lot of the "classics" of my own free will. I could read pretty comfortably into the 18th century, and I could understand most 17th century English.

I remember thinking at the time that I live to be an average 70, then at the rate of change I could see in books from various centuries, I should be able to witness some changes myself in my lifetime. And I mean changes in "real", core language, not merely the rapid churn of local dialects and slang. (Which the Internet has greatly accelerated. I suspect in general it pulls us all together towards a more "core" English, but it also means an incredible proliferation of local slang communities.)

Now that I'm 40, I can say that I'm definitely starting to notice it. It's not a fast process on a day-by-day basis, and it's hard to notice the small differences at first, or assume they're dialect differences (and in some cases they are, after all). But the change is definitely happening. I would be unsurprised within my lifetime that there's only "it's" and it has two distinct meanings, and that it will be officially recognized by dictionaries as such.

The "hacker" style of quoting [1] also seems to be generally accepted. I've on several occasions done something like 'Have you ever said "It's not a tumor!"?' and I'm yet to get jumped by a grammar nazi for the two punctuation marks like that, too. I suspect that'll never quite become the official style (a bit on the complicated side), but it doesn't seem to bother people much.

[1]: http://catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html