By distinction

I think it would be a good idea.

Not the Water Cooler where we are supposed to have some fun.

With the continued Specialization of TR being brought in perhaps you might like to go there for all of these silly side issues that are completely Irrelevant. ;)

Now it it pronounced Bit or Byte? ?:|

Col

You may have to wait for what you said about finding The Language to percolate, if it ever does. For anyone operating exclusively all their life within, yours is revolution without.

It's found in all of us, and we all supply the shifting consensus of 'standard usage'. For example, every five years a seemingly random word (or phrase) is chosen to replace 'great'. They ripple out from their origin to the extent that other people, on hearing the word in a new, but immediately recognizable context, 'vote' it into usage by, well, their usage. If you saw something you thought was 'neat', and someone else remarked that it was 'choice', you understood that there was (or was possibly going to be) a new word for 'snazzy'.....and it was now up to you to help make it happen or not.
BTW, you can thank us 50-somethings for 'cool'; we actually dethroned 'out of sight' (an extension of 'far out', and one I think we all could have done without) with it....
How it was that 'far out' knocked off 'groovy' I'll never know!

you have *standard English*... it has a generic name, but it is unique to you. You use it for communicating with people whose native language is distant from your own native language (even if both languages are also instances of English). So, *standard English* is a sort of pidgin trade language - a tool you break out when there's too much noise in the background for the finer tools.
And your *standard English* exists inside your head. Where did it come from? How did it get there? How did other people learn their instances of *standard English*? How can we define a Language - Standard English - so that these versions of it can be contained in it?

...exists in my head. I aquired mine primarily through staying awake as much as possible during my short time as a student, and corroborated much of it with Strunk and White's 'The Elements of Style' and Follet's 'Modern American Usage'. I, of course, can't speak to where anyone else got theirs (but I expect some have learned their English usage in prisons, or other less-orthodox learning environments). I constantly, consciously TEMPER my *standard English* on the fly, however, (with my other installed versions) to suit particular situations. If you read me on here, for example, ending a sentence in a preposition (or intoning, "Ain't it just grand!"), it's fairly certain I did so on purpose. In the case of 'since' (which you so succinctly synopsized above), I actually 'tempered' my pidgin trade language--standard English--with the colloquial 'vernacular version' for the benefit of the poster to whom I'd specifically replied: an African whose milk language I assumed to not be English. You could say, "I wrote the way I expected him to expect Americans to express themselves". At the first criticism of my "BIG ENGLISH GAFFE!!", I said as much, but the Teacher had already risen to his topic.....I did, however, enjoy parsing out subtext for further criticism.