>>>These days it seems in print you see the tortuous "more well-known" and "most well-known" instead of "better-known" and "best-known".
>>>
>>>Also, a new tipping point. With the exception of large advertising campaigns (where mistakes would bring ridicule and be expensive to fix), it seems that "its" and "it's" are used improperly more than half the time. The other day I saw a single sentence that contained both "its" and "it's", and was dumbfounded that both instances were correct - it's that rare these days. Far more common in that circumstance is for the writer to get them both wrong.
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>>It is also quite worrisome to me that I've been noticing a general trend toward increasing number of spelling and grammatical errors in "hardcopy" media (e.g. magazines, newspapers) -- something that I don't recall seeing when I was much younger. One would assume that since most of the time the articles in question would've been entered into a computer at some point, that a simple spellcheck would've caught these simple mistakes, and as a result, should make such mistakes a rather rare occurrence. I've also received numerous examples of business correspondence with (what I would consider to be) an unusually high number of spelling and grammatical errors -- from people who evidently use English as a primary language (and most of the time, English happens to be the *only* language they know). I'm dreading the day that I start seeing cover letters and resume that read like Lolcat...
>
>I see a lot more mistakes in newspapers than in magazines. I put that down to budget cuts that mean there aren't enough copy editors to go around.
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>Tamar

I think that as much as budget cuts there's been a shift in priorities that probably makes sense.
When I was a kid (waaaaaaaaaaaaay back when) we focused as much, or even more, on how we conveyed something as we did on what we were conveying.
That's been turned upside down and that's probably a good thing.
It's a trend that has been underway for a long time.
Walt Whitman changed the way people saw poetry.
If we compare Hemingway and Henry James, we can see the beginning of that trend in the mid 20th century novel.
Hemingway reduced several paragraphs of James' to one terse sentence.
Now we've reduced Ernie's sentence to OMG.
There's still room for grammatical precision and elegance but it has its time in place.
One word I miss is "whom."
We used it but I've never heard anyone in my kids or my grandkids generation use it.