Can you foresee a time when “those who don’t care” have pushed their version of the language to the point that they can’t communicate outside their limited circle?
It happens to degrees between generations and regions without severely mutilating the language, but you can also see how, taken to an extreme (aka Ebonics), it can make communication between groups of people nearly impossible even though they are using the same language.
There are many reasons to have standards, whether it be threaded fasteners, code libraries or English grammar, and they don’t necessarily indicate some sort of superiority complex by those promoting them.
It’s not a limited circle, it’s the majority. Proper grammar has never been how the masses communicated.
Groups get their own sub-dialects. It’s the nature of sub cultures. I work on an SF convention, we have entire conversations that “normal” people wouldn’t understand a single word of, because we have the shared knowledge. Same kind of thing in the software industry. When people are trying to communicate group ideas to non-group people they need remember to not use internal grammar.
Most of the time the “standards” are how the elite talk. It’s the language of government, top end of business and academia. Promoting them isn’t a superiority complex, but declaring yourself better because of them is. Look at the condescension on this thread, THAT’S a superiority complex.
I see it here on FRee Republic. I had to ask what "my bad" meant a few years ago. It seemed like all the twenty somethings understood the phrase immediately.