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It's also worth noting that a number of misspellings and grammatical slips promote ambiguity or call on the reader to mentally correct the text. Both of these can harm communication, if only by making the reader have to think about a less important issue.
Sometimes, such slips can waste the reader's time. I remember spending some time in grad school with a sentence in a translation of Kant that said something like: "This can not happen". (The "This" and "happen" are made up right now, because I no longer remember the exact words; the "can not" is an exact quote.) Given that the situation Kant was talking about seemed like something that Kant would think is impossible, I spent some time trying to figure out why instead of saying that the situation is impossible, Kant merely said that it can fail to happen. Finally, puzzled, I pulled out the German version, and even though I don't actually know German, it became obvious that "can not" was a misspelling of "cannot". Oops.
I also find that a writer's holding on to the distinction between "who" and "whom" makes complex phrases easier to parse. (I have never actually seen, however, a case in print where there was real ambiguity due to the use of "who" for "whom". Though a case is possible. Compare "Who am I to kill?" (the speaker thinks he or she is not a killer) with "Whom am I to kill?")
That said, it's still true that language changes, that distinctions disappear and new ones show up.
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