This is going to get worse.
Walk into a high school classroom, write a sentence on the board, and ask the students to label the parts of speech.
Don't be too surprised when only two or three students even bother to raise their hands.
Walk into a high school classroom, write a sentence on the board, and ask the students to label the parts of speech.
Don't be too surprised when only two or three students even bother to raise their hands.
This article isn't even talking about the ability to name the different grammatical components, though. It seems to be talking about comprehension of sentence forms. There is a hint that using "every" can sometimes be misinterpreted.
But we see that linguistic shift anyway. Things like "I could care less" are regarded as conveying the speaker's meaning, while the linguistic analysis of the form suggests a meaning opposite to that normally inferred, or implied.
"Every" is frequently misplaced, and people seem to assume they know what the speaker means. Following logical analyses we often find that the speaker didn't actually say what they meant, and the listener understood something different again.
Of course I can't speak for him, but the premise of the movie is a slow steady decline in education leading to the above quote, which is given to the protagonist (after he wakes up in the future) by a doctor as a diagnosis.