We are, ladies and gentlemen, approaching the end of days – at least in terms of etiquette. First, strangers email me hoping I enjoyed the sunny weekend. Have we met? Who are you? What are you trying to sell me through this importunate penetration of my sacred veil of intimacy, you disgusting blob (no offence)?

Second, they sign off their emails with a kiss. Perhaps, I once thought, this farewell kiss from strangers (often from women with attractive-sounding names and all their own teeth) meant that I'm so gorgeous that even online they can't help themselves from hitting on me. The truth turned out to be much more dismal. They didn't fancy me, but thought that "x" is a professionally acceptable means of concluding a business communication. Which it isn't.

What's needed, incidentally, is an emoticon that means a firm handshake rather than an air kiss. But the online world doesn't roll that way: it goes all the way on the first date, as it were, and then has nowhere to go afterwards. Thanks, internet, for ruining flirting (ironic face).

And then, third, right now, men are wearing flip-flops. In offices! As though that were legitimate workwear! Which it isn't!

Can we just rewind and start the business of being civilised human beings communicating in elegant English again? Apparently not. A new survey suggests that Britons are more likely to say "cheers" or "ta" than "thank you". Some of you even use the word "cool" to express gratitude, not realising that it connotes – at best – agreement rather than thanks. True, while I eschew "cool", I sometimes sign off with "coolio", but only to give my communications a retro mid-90s gangsta vibe.

Don't you realise, I want to say to people who say "cool" instead of "thank you", that Edward de Bono pointed out that "cool" confers no moral excellence on an action or person and yet it is presumed to be what everyone in this benighted verbally challenged, amoral age aspires to be? No? Well, you should.

Four out of 10 respondents said "thank you" was too formal, while one in 10 said it was old-fashioned. What the poll didn't report is that six out of 10 think the four out of 10 should stop thinking informality is a good thing, while nine out of 10 thought the one out of 10 who thinks "thank you" is old fashioned should be put in stocks and pelted with wet sponges until they recant.

But what sort of people are we dealing with here? Who substitutes "thank you" for "nice one" for instance? I suspect you say "nice one" only if the kind of verbally challenged person derided by Jarvis Cocker in Sorted for Es and Whizz:

"Everybody asks your name/ They say we're all the same/ and it's "nice one, geezer"/ But that's as far as the conversation went."

In other words, the sort of clubbable, glazed-eyed festival goer who knows how to pitch a tent and score excellent drugs but not, surely, one with whom you might have a detailed argument about the relevance to modern life of Epicurus's philosophy nor one who puts a premium on personal daintiness, if you catch my drift. And "cool"? Wannabe hipster doofuses with receding hairlines, paunches and a doomed existential quest to be thought groovy by twentysomethings with asymmetric hair and sexual confidence to spare. I may sound derisive here, but I was that hipster doofus. Once.

And who says "Cheers!" instead of thank you? Nervous people desperate for approval, uncertain of their status and judging by the appropriation of this drinking toast, recovering or non-recovering alcoholics. This may sound unfairly judgmental but I don't care for your opinion. Thank you!

What about "ta"? Often this is used by those (think Rory Kinnear's character in Count Arthur Strong) who want to be thought nice people by others of lower social status than they. "Ta", in other words, is the go-to informality for poshos making nice to those they suspect to be proles but whom they want on side for reasons too boring to get into. Boris Johnson is too posh to make nice thus, but you can imagine Dave or Sam Cam saying "ta" when they're in the corner shop (as if that scenario ever happens) rather than bawling out the Boden call centre (where the more formal, if sarcastic, "thank you!" would be deployed).

laters Photograph: guardian.co.uk

"Wicked"? Counter-cultural macramé weavers who eschewed formal education in favour of the university of life. What this means is, actually, they can't construct sentences involving subjunctive clauses since their sense of grammar has been corrupted by acid flashbacks from the 1960s. Or perhaps that's unfair.

Clearly using two syllables rather than one is just too much effort for slugabed Britons – especially now the sun has been out for a couple of days. No wonder we have to import workers from eastern Europe to do the laborious tasks for which this slacker nation that once – incredibly – ruled (though obviously quite immorally) the greatest empire, the world is now too lazy to perform. (God they'd lap this stuff up at the Mail or Telegraph.)

The classic configuration of gratitude is being supplanted among the younger generation (is there an emoticon yet for an angry face looking at you over my oldster's bifocals?) with constructions such as "wicked" and "nice one". Both, clearly, are not expressions of gratitude but ones of approbation. They don't mean thank you, thank you very much.

Let's consider that venerable abbreviation "ta". I've used it, you've used it and anybody with minimal competence in British slang uses it. But should we? After all, as Collins English Dictionary points out, "ta" originated in the 18th century as "imitative of baby talk". What, are we taking borderline pre-verbal babies as role models for correct English usage now?

"Ta" was used in TS Eliot's The Waste Land as the poet parodied lower-class London speech to suggest, perhaps, a Spenglerian decline in values of English usage. Thus, instead of Hamlet's "Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night", Eliot's London toughs said farewell thus: "Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight." The "ta ta" did not signify of gratitude, to be sure, but it was an infantilised farewell nonetheless. Modern life, Eliot thus implied (prefiguring Blur), is rubbish.

I know what you're thinking. I don't need no tight-arse anti-semite ponce of a poet to teach me 'ow to talk proper, noworrimean, yer? Good point, and well expressed, if I may say so. You were going for Arthur "Yus my Dear" Mullard, right?

Nonetheless I worry that infantile "goonight" and the babyish "ta", signify that we are creating a linguistic waste land in lieu of the commanding English of Shakespeare, Milton and, to a lesser extent, Peter Andre.

In the not-too distant future, I predict, while the French will sign off their letters according to long-established formules de politesse such as "Je vous prie d'agréer, mesdames, messieurs, l'expression de mes sentiments distingués", while across the Channel we'll be concluding our correspondence with "Laters, yeah? Goo-goo ga-ga innit." Just wait and see.

What next? Why not, if someone does something that requires your expression of gratitude, pull out their spine and leave their bloody corpse twitching on the pavement rather than making the verbal effort to say thank you properly?

big love Photograph: Guardian

Or perhaps I'm going too far. After all, this isn't the first survey to predict the death of the thank you. Two years ago a survey commissioned by Food Network UK found that even though the average Briton still says thank you up to 5,000 times a year, 40% of respondents believed they use "thank you" less than previous generations.

The problem then is not that Britons are less willing to express gratitude, but that we express that gratitude in a manner that drives farts like me nuts. Hold that thought.

The Food Network survey was done to launch the first Thank You Day. The what now? Aren't there so many dedicated days nowadays that the Thank You Day probably clashed with – oooh – IBS Day, which isn't to be confused with National IDS day (IBS is about bowels, IDS about the work and pensions secretary – very different things.). But do we need one? We're British after all, it's not like we're, erm … [Subs, please could you insert a gratuitous slur here? Ta!]

Thank You Day actually takes place on 11 January, so you've plenty of time to prepare celebrations. I'm thinking street parties, nationwide cordiality-offs, hugging your refuse collector and telling him/her "Thank you – for being you!". Like any of that's going to happen in this increasingly graceless, asocial, gratitude-free kingdom.

Are we in fact expressing enough gratitude? The new survey found that more than half of us feel appreciated by our partners but only 5% by our bosses. When did your boss last say "thank you"? Never, that's when, because he/she is too busy saying "wicked", "laters" "ta", "cool" and "you go girl" so they don't seem too old to attract the attention of the Inhuman Resources department in the next round of voluntary redundancies. Am I right? You know I am.

But the survey also found that 83% of those surveyed (there were 2,000 respondents who, actually, would have preferred an iPad mini each rather than, as they got, a functionally worthless "cheers, mate" from researchers) think we need to express more gratitude. Britons need to stop saying sorry and say thank you more; for truly, every day is National Sorry Day in this over-apologetic, under-grateful country.

But there's a problem: "thank you" may not always signify gratitude. Think of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon the convenience-store owner in The Simpsons and his sometimes cod-cheery passive aggressive "Thank you! Come again!" As Slavoj Žižek points out in his guide to Lacanian psychoanalysis, How to Read Lacan, we must distinguish manifest from latent content. What this means is that Apu is sometimes being sarcastic and it's the devil of a job to find out when.

In his superbly choleric guide to English usage, The King's English, Kingsley Amis helpfully distinguished between berks and wankers. The former are the kind of people Eliot implicitly excoriated. Or, as Amis put it: "Berks are careless, coarse, crass and of what anybody would agree is of a lower social class than one's own. They speak in a slipshod way with dropped Hs, intruded glottal stops and many mistakes in grammar. Left to them the English language would die of impurity like late Latin."

Typically berks don't know or care that adverbs are different from adjectives and use the latter in lieu of the former. This ignorance, incidentally, qualifies berks to monopolise the positions of "expert" summarisers during fatuous football commentaries on Radio 5 Live. Here's another way to spot a berk: no berk can express gratitude properly, thanks very much.

And wankers? "Wankers are prissy, fussy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one's own. They speak in an over-precise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded, especially Hs. Left to them the language would die of purity, like medieval Latin."

Amis counselled a middle way between slipshod and punctilious, between, as it were, berkshire and wankerdom. Surprising: I took Amis pere to be pure-blood wanker – an ally in the unending fight against wrongness in its many linguistic forms. But perhaps he's right. Our task, as English speakers, is to express ourselves elegantly and gratefully in a tongue not hobbled by rules. For that reason I'd like to thank you for reading this article, and add: Laters, yeah? Wicked! Big love x.