Not elderly. And I don’t know about my “hear” having anything in it. But I am literate, and I am a native speaker of English. Made a living writing for several years. People who aspire to write for publication ought to at least know what the words mean. And words do have specific meanings. Sorry, I have a low tolerance for ignorance and incompetence.
I used to be of similar bent.
In this case, I find your definitions overly narrow.
And I find your quickness to label such ignorant and incompetent . . . a little disturbing.
None of us have the same set of experiences or education.
DIFFERENT is not always BETTER or more anything but DIFFERENT.
Most of my PhD colleagues spell as horribly as I do.
Ignorance involves massive amounts of knowledge in our era. Everyone is ignorant about some things. We must pick and choose where to put our interest and energy.
Yeah, some publications . . . probably most . . . need better proofing. It’s nice to have polished publications.
Some character messed up my entry in the Who’s Who volume for that year. I wasn’t thrilled but it was probably good for my humility.
Incompetence . . . yeah, there’s an overabundance of it in needless ways to needless degrees in critical areas our era.
There’s also an overabundance of Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder.
Perhaps you’ve come across the little story . . . from memory very imperfectly . . .
The great PhD grammarian had fallen in a large hole in the middle of the road late at night.
Some Chimney sweeps or some such happened by and he called to them to help get him out of the deep hole.
They responded in coarse farctured English.
. . . which he instructed them to ammend.
They decided that they were too incompetent to get him out of the hole—that he’d best wait for someone with better English.
Life is too short to get too wound up about some things.