to think the word is 'Little'

[Arsenic]

Two syllables, hard consonant sound in the middle?

Bayrans-no NI. There must be more than one!

Sad but one assumes that they have (what seems to them to be) good reason?
Perhaps amongst their peers status is reduced if you are seen to be overly literate or intellectual?

is that just the way things are these days?

Anyone fancy a sarnie?

I don't think you can put it down to social class or a particular demographic. An acquaintance of mine is a senior teacher, very MC and always speaks beautifully. She held off having a mobile phone for ages, but having got one she texts (she doesn't do FB) like a demented teenager - all z's and lols and weird abbreviations/misspellings that half the time you have to say aloud to try and decipher what she's saying. The first time I ever got a text from her I thought one of her school kids (or should that be kidz) had got hold of her phone and was sending random messages out...

Going all the way back to page 1 or 2, "I could care less" is a contraction of the original phrase, something along the lines of "I could care less but it wouldn't be easy". Not all people who use the phrase are aware of this though and it irritates a lot of Americans.
Very little bad spelling and grammar on the internet bothers me, but there is one person on my FB who consistently spells the word "his" "he's". That does my nut in.