In Flux

I laughed at it.
I discredited as "bad" English. I pointed it out to my family--predominately educators. There it was, on the packaging of a gift I had bought for my niece: "3 Wood Egg Shakers."
"Wood!" I said, "It's a noun! If you want an adjective you're going to have to go with 'wooden'!"

This observation broke the dam. A flood of grammatical pet peeves flowed forth. People use apostrophes to denote plurals instead of possession, double negatives, bad spelling, and "text" has become a verb!

We're losing our language, my family decided. I balked.
In a certain sense, this is correct. In another, more important sense, it's just plain wrong.

English teachers, or teachers of any language for that matter, may hate me for it, but I must point out that grammatical rules are not universal. They are not immutable. They are only normative to a very small extent: a much lesser extent than some people may want to give them credit for.
More about normativity later. For now, let's start with description.

Natural languages (commonly spoken ones) exist in flux. They change drastically over time and space. Yes, space. We speak the same English as the English?
And time is so much clearer. Languages evolve. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Thoreau, and I all wrote in English. Although you might properly say none of us writes in the same language.
And in that sense, my family is correct: we are losing our language. This version of English will pass away like all the others.

Over the past few decades, as the speed and ease of communication have increased, so has the rate of the language's evolution. And, as the language changes, so do it's rules. We shouldn't be surprised by this.

Now to the normative bit: maybe from what I've said, we have alienated the speakers of a language from it's rulebooks. As much as it may pain the high school Language Arts faculty, we should not insist on outmoded rules, and we should expect our current ones to change over time. Especially if they are exposed to be arbitrary, and not quite the criteria for distinguishing between "proper" and "improper" usage.

A few clarifications: first, it is not that the rules don't exist, or aren't rules. They are subjective to time and place, and so will change. Newer usages may irritate us, but if they become standard, that shouldn't bother us so much.

Second, the rules are not non-normative. They really do determine proper usage, but only within the spatio-temporal context of the speaker. And at that, the content is more important than the structure.

Third, and most important, the rules as they exist in usage, are noticed and then put into textbooks, not the other way around. That is, usage dictates rules (generally speaking).

So, I can proudly say now, that I am just going to go Google some wood fishes, and maybe text you about it later.