The internet warps English in peculiar ways. Languages have developmental periods similar to the way toddlers gradually morph into children, then adolescents and, later, adults. As languages develop, they grow swiftly when speakers mishear and misuse words, expanding vocabularies and twisting sentence structure. However, this rate of change slows from a garden hose gush to an occasional drip as literacy grows widespread and texts become mass-produced. Few new words crop up, many of them inherited from other languages. Enter the internet and social media, which have rocket-fueled the rate of change. For example, sites like the Urban Dictionary now spread niche usages of words from speech into print through the slangy, conversational writing of blogs, posts, and tweets. In contrast, the migration of journalism from print to websites has flattened English as people use it globally. As recently as the early 2000s, you could read a splendid variety of world Englishes from newspapers in countries where English was merely the language of tourism. But, today, in online newspapers those alternative dialects have flattened into versions of Standard English, presumably because online dailies and weeklies want to capture readers and revenue from advertising for larger audiences. Consequently, online journalism now shows signs of an awareness of a wider readership and sensitivity to a more standardized English, even for journalism in countries where only tourists speak English. Welcome to the paradox of world Englishes today, where writers can nudge the boundaries of the correctness du jour and flex the muscles of their native dialects of English – but only as long as they signal that they have an iron grip on Standard English.