On Accident vs By Accident

In the olden days, when people communicated by letter, their lack of grammar and spelling abilities would be shown up only to the recipient. Now everyone's creative approach to English is communicated to the world online, to the extent that 'correct' grammar and spelling is becoming extremely hazy and people are picking up bad habits.

It is considered bad manners on-line to correct someone else's English, and oddly (not really) this one aspect of manners and courtesy is respected where otherwise anarchy reigns. Language changes and evolves, fair enough. However, the errors seep into formal writing, news reports, and ultimately legal documents. Many of the common errors, for example, confuse words that mean the opposite to each other. Either accept or except can be correctly used in a sentence, but one will mean exactly the opposite to the other, and could have catastrophic results. Look how much of an issue a single comma has caused in the American constitution.

Rain, reign, rein are all different words. One of them is used incorrectly in Boards' rules and regulations - we keep telling them but it hasn't been changed. If they can be used interchangeably why not spell it rane and save ourselves a lot of bother?

The only consolation is that when the current aging crop of people who were actually taught English grammar finally dies out, someone will have invented a computer program that can construct non-ambiguous sentences. Won't that be fun? Who needs literature and poetry?