Of course, I should have said "have" always been appalling, but who's counting?

I've read Gower's book and many more. They mainly discuss style, not the other things. A list of 100 obnoxious usages would still be only 100 out of a hundred thousand. Of course, there's always room for improvement.

I suspect that the average person's writing style too has always been appalling, particularly since most of the population has never had to do much formal writing. It may seem worse now because we're exposed to more of it in the media (including online postings), and because it's very hard to teach writing to students who'd rather rock.

Much current journalism (to take an example) is too trivial and breezy for my taste. On the other hand, 99% of it is lucid and lively.

But I don't have any definite statistics, particularly comparing now with then. I'm not even sure that any could be established. There seem to be too many variables involved. And how do you measure taste?