Reddit reviews Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care
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Used Book in Good Condition
John McWhorter published a pretty interesting book back in 2003 called [Doing our own Thing] (http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Our-Own-Thing-Degradation/dp/1592400167) which goes into a lot of detail about changing "fashions" in grammar.
There's an excellent chapter, worth the price of the book alone, in which he takes to task those who deplore the "recent" degradation of language. By working gradually back in time, he quotes and critiques articles that claim the current generation is ruining that language, before stepping back a generation to find an older bellyacher making the same argument... and on and on, until we're back in the time of Shakespeare. It really pus the futility of these complaints into perspective.
Second John McWhorter--I became a linguist in part due to reading Doing Our Own Thing. I think a standard pop-linguistics text is Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct.
EDIT: Phrasing