Sweet story...

[Thumpalumpacus]

I don't make a fetish of traditional terms myself. We are taught that the classics are high art, but if you look at the writing, oftentimes it is far outside the bounds of what was considered at the time good writing -- Hemingway with his run-on sentences, Chaucer with his bawdy punnery, and so forth. The spoken language is only different in that it evolves faster than the written language, but that evolution is entirely natural, because humans use language to describe their experiences, and their experiences change with the eras.

I'm not fond of American shorthand -- "thru", "nu", text-speak, and so on -- but I think that is probably a result of it being evolved from the language as I learnt it, rather than the language itself being debased. Simply because something is old doesn't mean it's better, and simply because something is new, that doesn't mean it is intrinsically inferior. Repurposing words, shortening their length, introducing slang into the "proper" lexicon ("ain't" got your teacher's opprobrium when I was a child, but it's in the OED now) -- that's all fine with me, because at the root of it, language is a tool, and a tool is only as survivable as it is adaptable.

I write that as a lifelong lover of the language.

When someone says "kick him to the curb" they certainly succeed in conveying a clear mental image,
even though it isn't exactly Shakespeare.

I dunno, it sounds very much like Shakespeare, to me. He was always making up turns of phrase like that. 

One of my favorite Shakespearean inventions is the term "elbow-room".

He invented lots of badass and still-used phrases.

Mazactly!