Sorely in need of a linguistic emollient

no pun intended (seriously though)
I just read this article by John Humphries (a Brit of course) about the deterioration of English as a language (at least it seemed to me to be about English, though I don't think he specifically mentioned English.......really, what else could he be talking about?)
The most priceless quote in the whole article is this:
'There can be no more grotesque illustration of the demise of formality on television than the rise of the monstrous confidence trick that goes by the name of "reality television"'.
Ok, maybe the most priceless quote is really this:
'The simple fact is we cannot afford to be careless with our language, because if we are careless with our language then we are careless with our world and sooner or later we will be lost for words to describe what we have allowed to happen to it.'
Yes, yes, it's the latter that is the better, without doubt.

So as we all know, I could probably carry on ad infinitum about how common parliance in the American English language has devolved into a thick bramble of meaningless clauses, sentence fragments, unidentified pronouns (no, they don't fly), and a myriad of other minutae that actually make the difference between the ability to communicate one's thoughts, feelings, & ideas and being totally inarticulate and unable to string the right words together in the right order to make the simplest action or intention understood by all involved.
Last semester, when I was student teaching, one of my kids had the audacity to send me an e.mail wherein she refered to me as "u". I kid you not. She didn't even have the good sense to capitalize the u, which perhaps might have been construed by me as a feeble attempt at a demonstration of respect, an aknowledgement, since she was only e.mailing me because she was turning her final project assignment in LATE, (much like all of her other work, shoddy and thrown together) that she was indeed sorry and recognized the error of her ways. No, she didn't even capitalize the u.
Anyway, I digress: I am in no way implying that I am not guilty of some of the same offences as others (though I can freely and proudly state that I have NEVER e.mailed any of my professors and refered to them as u, capital or otherwise) ; I have been known not to identify pronouns (to which my father will attest with great vehemence, I'm sure) to dangle participles, to end sentences with prepositions, to generally break the rules of English, not to mention that I don't use the subjunctive mood nearly often enough when I'm speaking English, and, and, and, etc. etc. etc.

This is my rant for today. Thank you for your support.