It seems like a story written as a converstion, breathy and slightly disjointed, with double-nested interpolations. The long interpolation all the way from the first dash to the colon, rather undermines the contrast between "at first" and "now", so it is a bit hard to get back on track.
One could try a third dash instead of the semi-colon; or even insert "whereas" or "but"; not sure that makes it better though.

@HS if the sole criterion of "right" or "wrong" English were what falls soft or hard upon your ears, then what shall we do when you are gone?
Come, we need an more empirical measure.

@HS "defeat against" also crops up, although to my ear it sounds a bit odd; the point here is that just because we have not come across a particular collocation in our own milieu or experience - that does not make it "wrong" per se. In teaching English to "foreigners" we do emphasize normal collocations like "a telltale sign", "a dead giveaway", but that does not make "a telltale giveaway" wrong, just unusual.

What in fact is the difference between a collocation and a well-worn cliche, or indeed a treasured quote from Shakespeare or KJV?

"Some candle clear burns somewhere I come by." - is this "right" or "wrong" English? (from Gerald Manley Hopkins)

If one takes on board that English has always been changing, then (whilst I admit "defeat to" would not be a phrase I would use) - then the only question is whether its current usage makes it acceptable in business/academic/media contexts i.e. is it now "standard" English? Clearly yes indeed.

Dear Grumpy
1) It is not an evolution - it has been around for some time (perhaps 200 years according to Ngrams), if you would care to google "defeat to", although I could not sleuth out the actual quote.
2) If you choose to be grumpy about it, of course you will thole; if, however, you came to realise that evolution is a natural on-going process, then your tholing would lessen greatly.

Opinions are often stated as facts; of course statements are often just the opinion of the writer, unless quoted or otherwise.
In an academic treatise one must ask where is the evidence; was there as survey of "everyone" in this case or is the statement just wishful thinking on the part of the writer?
Sometimes journalists say or write things like "everyone here is (something or other)"; and one must wonder how many people they asked and whether the respondents reflect a proper (random) cross-section of "everyone".

There is a tradition in English academic (and business) writing to avoid the first person and not to preface every sentence with "I think that". One of the results is that opinions tend to be stated as if they are facts.

The above is of course just my own opinion. You should wonder where the evidence is.

Offices, titles, and positions such as president, king, emperor, pope, bishop, abbot, executive director are common nouns and therefore should be in lower case when used generically: Mitterrand was the French president or There were many presidents at the meeting. They are capitalized only in the following cases:

When followed by a person's name to form a title, i.e. when they can be considered to have become part of the name: President Nixon, not president Nixon
When a title is used to refer to a specific and obvious person as a substitute for their name, e.g. the Queen, not the queen, referring to Elizabeth II
When the correct formal title is treated as a proper name (e.g. King of France; it is correct to write Louis XVI was King of France but Louis XVI was the French king)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Capital_letters#Proper_names

@WW
(a) This has nothing to do with "anglish"; it is just about how Middle English came about, and in particular, why we ended up with something of a creole, rather than one language winning out with just a few hundred words borrowed, as happened in Gaul, Ireland, or indeed Hungarian under Ottoman/Turkish occupation.

(b) I don't disagree with your explanations; after all Middle English does sound like someone who learnt English as a child, but was taught French. The question is: how and when did illiterate peasants and the village blacksmith take onboard all those French borrowings? It just seems to me that, away from court and castle , words like "frith", "wlite", and "ea" may have kept on for much longer than written records would suggest. (In fact I heard "ea" in Norfork about 1960). However, short of time-travel we may never be sure!

(c) Perhaps hearing the bible read out every Sunday in Welsh (from 16th century) onwards saved that language. Perhaps all those French words in Wycliffe's translation overwrote the older English equivalents in the minds of English folk.

(d) I suppose my whole thinking is based on the assumption that borrowings from Anglo-Norman and/or French are unusually high in comparison with similar takeover situations. Perhaps in the intial phase it wasn't - it was the inroads made by "Parisian" french from the late 1200s onward which are atypical.

Just to clarify:

A) Yes OE was changing and losing inflections already.

B) In many cases the invaders impose their own tongue as the language of administration, but native languages live on more or less intact in the hills and among the peasants, at least in some areas. Eg: Spanish, Portugese in Central/South America. Latin in Western Europe. Contrast this with ME and the slaughter of OE vocabulary.

@WW Thanks - I had quite overlooed the northeast extent of OE.

I have been struggling to get my head round the origins of Middle English. The ask is whether the English that has come down to us today is the result of OE gradually taking onboard Anglo-French words instead of the original ones; or whether ME is really just a creole used by the ruling class to communicate with soldiers, merchant and the like (and the peasants continued speaking OE)

What seems clear is that (1) OE was actually quite a large number of dialects, and (2) the number of Norman settlers was very small (8000?) in relation to the OE-speaking population (1-1.5 million).

The Franks invaded Gaul, and yes French took in a thousand Germanic words but didn't change like OE->ME.

The French tried it again in Vietnam, but after sixty years with French as the language of the ruling class and taught in all schools, the impact on Vietnamese seems quite small, just a few hundred words at the most - words for ideas and things which were new. And no creole.

(There's also the impact of the English in India, Australia, NZ and so on, or the Russians in the Caucasus and Siberia, to consider.)

But I fail to understand how 80% of OE vocabulary fell by the wayside. If ME began as an upper-class creole, how did it come to be adopted by uneducated peasants? Or why did OE borrow "chair" when it already had "stool", "joy" for "frothe" (and all the others) - there was no need for all that borrowing; law-french, yes, new ideas yes, but everyday words how come?

This may all sound a long way from the original thread topic; but we need a framework to make any deeming about English today or to-come.

@HS Panglish is already here: just listen in the supermarket or coffee shop; they already miss the 's' off dollars, like "Ten dollar thirty, please". But it is no horror, just change is normal.
Again, standard English may well have a good innings, just like Latin did.

BTW I'm playing at Albany Presbyterian Church this Sat 2 pm - your neck of the woods, I think.