Linguistic abomination

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Dammit it is sometimes very hard not to look down on the American flavor of the English language.
Today I heard two apparent abominations in one news report. Please tell me I'm not the only one who shudders at the sound of "yearly" instead of "annually" and "fourths" instead of "quarters". I feel like we're heading down the Orwellian route to New Speak? The logic of these alternative words is obvious, but if you lose all the quirks in a language then you lose the colors you can paint with it. Plus, it sounds weird.

Needless to say I immediately Googled both these words, expecting to fuel my indignation, instead finding that they are completely acceptable, if a little bland, alternatives. Much like my initial consternation over the great date swap (writing 31st January 2015 as 01/31/15 - watt???) I'm sure I'll get over it, because although it feels like a linguistic abortion language is all about communication, and if I persist in using turns of phrase or syntax that no other bugger understands then I have missed the point entirely.

This debate normally stirs up the old chestnut "Americans don't speak proper English". Can't really be arsed with this one, but basically language is always changing and adapting. American English has evolved in a different direction to British English, but to roughly the same extent over the last 400 years. One can't expect a language to stay static, especially when it has so many varied influences on it over the course of a few centuries, and Britain and America have had incredibly different cultural and historical influences, so it would be mental to assume that we'd be speaking 17th century english right now.

I think these little linguistic differences represent the bigger cultural differences that I've mused on in the past. Basically, Limeys like pedigree and Yanks opt for convenience. We revel in the subtle distinctions between regal, royal and kingly, and our Americans cousins go for the easiest and most logical option to remember/spell/get the point across. Both are totally legitimate - language's main purpose is to communicate and if you're a new country created by immigrants from across the world your primary goal is to make your language understandable and easy to use. If you're a country that is arrogant enough to send its patrons onto the Costa Del Sol to demand beer and a fry-up in loud voices then you care less about being understood and more about showing who's boss. And then getting a pint. Which you can achieve by ridiculing the changes that have been made to the language outside its native land over the last few hundred years.

All of that said, I still feel a bit sick when people butcher my version of the language, but I'm trying to take the moral high ground here.