The 'purity' of English

It is funny to see how many people still view languages in moral terms – not just in 'right' or 'wrong' but even in terms of ‘purity’. This usually reflects of form of nostalgia for a golden age [that never existed] when people spoke and wrote well. Many lament for instance over the Americanization of English.
It is quite ironic when in fact many of those Americanisms that some British ‘purists’ decry are actually originally British expressions. They have been preserved in the colonies while lost in the motherland. (see here and here)
Here are some good examples of words lost by the British but still quite common in the U.S.:

• fall (US) as a synonym for autumn (GB)
• trash(US) for rubbish (GB)
• frame-up(US) which was reintroduced to Britain through Hollywood gangster movies
• loan(US) as a verb instead of lend
• quit (US) as in "to cease an activity" (as opposed to "to leave a location" as still used in most other Anglophone countries)
• gotten (US) as a past participle of get.
• creek (US) for stream (GB)
• or again the word diaper (US) which apparently goes back at least to Shakespeare, and usage was maintained in the U.S. and Canada, but was replaced in the British Isles with 'nappy'.

A similar phomenon also exists in grammar. For instance the subjunctive mood ( "far be it from me", America, America, God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good... ) is more common in North American English than in British English (British English has a strong tendency to replace subjunctives with auxiliary verb constructions).

This is obviously not to say that American English has not changed, evolved and taken a life of its own. If nothing else, it has been greatly influenced by the languages spoken by the immigrants. It just means that the idea of ‘purity’ of a language is as ridiculous as the idea of purity in a culture. It is all mixed with something else. Besides, to see exclusively things in binary terms - as we have seen in the last few years in politics - is awfully conservative and can have real damaging consequences, isn't it? Well, we could 'almost' say it is quite... "wrong" ... but we won't!

In this French book (called Americana) about the history of American music for instance, you find out that Irish traditional music was lost in Ireland and was eventually reintroduced through the Irish-American community which had preserved it.
Another example might be the ‘Italian pizza’. Which is the ‘real’ thing? Does it really matter as long as diversity continues to exist?
The only ‘real’ thing is that thing you like! Here we go again with 'freedom'!

NOTE: the same thing can be said between French and English. After all, between a third to half of the English words come more or less directly from the French language. In French the English word 'flirt' which is considered an Anglicism actually comes from the old French expression 'conter fleurette' which means "to (try to) seduce" by the dropping of flower leaves.