Wasting words on lowercases and capitals

I'm a fan of English. I've dedicated roughly 87.5% of my life to learning, developing, and refining my sense of grammar, diction, and vocabulary, and frankly I'm rather proud of the results thus far. There's a certain satisfaction in being able to state things in a clear yet witty manner using a precise combination of subjects, verbs, adjectives, and predicate nominatives. Besides the fact that having an extensive grasp of the language is helpful when scribbling timed papers on Truman Capote, it also exudes a general aura of intelligence. If the fact that most high schools around the country require four years of English class is any indication, I'm not the only one who appreciates the value of literacy. No one wants to sound stupid.

That being said, it seems ironic that everything in our culture seems to be trying to make the general population speak as unintelligently as possible. Between white twelve year olds wearing G Unit jerseys trying to convince me that "shizzle" is a word and internet ditzes who use "dun" instead of "don't" and flank every sentence with "lol," I've just about lost faith in America's ability to speak. There's no problem with not sounding like the Bronte sisters or not knowing what "incorrigible" means, but in a world where "da gurl dat think she ballin but she not" is an acceptable sentence, some sort of issue can't be denied.

I'm not sure when we deviated. Was it back when Nick At Nite started encouraging the misspelling of everyday words? Was it more recently, when white suburbia was struck with the sudden urge to be "ghetto"? Or was it Michael Jackson (while he speaks fairly articulately everyone can agree he is the embodiment of everything unnatural and wrong)?

It can be argued that the degeneration of our linguistic skills is in some ways natural; back in the day contractions were considered horribly informal and Mark Twain was shocking. But do we really want a future in which our business leaders debate the economy using streams of expletives and the occasional "yo mamma"? I'm just going to assume and hope that the hip, slang-using teens of today will mature into the hip, slang-using rappers, DJs, and neo-hippies of tomorrow, while the rest of us nerdy, literate people will do what we always do: be the successful ones in the end.

Straight up.