Embarrassed has A's in it?!?

My suspicions have been rewarded, as a recent study of Americans ability to spell (compared to Britons) shows just how far down the linguistic hill we have slid. And this study comprised adults, mind you, not our Internet savvy and grammar- and punctuation-challenged youth. Our ability to spell and comprehend our our language is declining, and this observation is not counting the lazy attitude taken toward it when instant messaging. I will often intentionally skip capitalization and omit commas and periods, I'll even go as far as shorting my words in the popular method kids use these days, but I can write out a sentence with the proper structure anytime I want to. Alas, I cannot say the same for some of the people I know, although I love them dearly.
I see this as part of a much larger problem. As a society, we are becoming lazier when it comes to our own language, preferring to skip or change letters to make something seem more hip, in some obscure way. Extreme has become x-treme!, and anything with an S that can be changed to a Z is done so with frightening regularity. This bothers me not just as an English major, but also as a speaker and reader of this, our bastardized language. We are taking one of the more complex languages on the planet and deconstructing it to fit our lifestyle. Far too often I have heard (or said) 'sup,' instead of 'Hey, how are you doing?' or even 'What is up?' the line from whence this completely used-up contraction came from.
The examples are many, and tiresome to repeat here. My basic grievance with this problem is that I fear it is a sign of our communal declining intelligence. People just don't seem to care that they cannot spell properly. These are the same people who read very little, or not at all. We should be proud to have control over such a difficult language, something I consider the bastard son of German and Latin, with Greek thrown in for good measure. We use words from many different languages on a regular basis, and most don't know or haven't considered where them came from. Anyone who straps on a pair of Nike's should know of the fleet-footed god it descended from. How many people think that guacamole is a Spanish word? Most, I'm sure, do not know of it's native South American origin. There is just no interest in our tongue.
I foresee a day when our words have become either phonetic or completely fallen out of common usage, if this trend keeps up. The loss of handwriting I can live with, but the complete ruination of our language? That is just too much. Research has shown that we lose a distinct language every two weeks on this planet, that's twenty-five a year. Instead of tossing our distinct language into the pit of decay, we should be refining it, making American English something to be proud of, not scoffed at by the British or ruined by advertising agencies. I really don't know where it will go from here, this trashing of the only language most of us grew up with. I really don't see the sense in demanding new-comers to this country to speak our language when we can hardly handle it ourselves. Just put down the remote for a moment, or back away from the keyboard, and pick up a book, or dust off the dictionary and learn a new word or two. You'll be amazed at what you can learn from your own language.