≪The press is one medium, TV another, the blogosphere another; all together they are the media.≫ And so say I. I often hear or read two other senses of "media", wrongly used even by educated people. My wife is a radiologist. Radiologists use contrast media to enhance images. Contrast media are chemicals injected into a patient intravenously or ingested by the patient orally. Sometimes a single contrast medium is used on a patient, sometimes two contrast media are used, for one examination. I have seen many technical articles in reputable academic medical journals in which "media" is used by some Dr. Med. or Prof. Dr. when the details of the examination made it clear that a single medium was (to be) used. Slap dash writing. Secondly, networkers use the term "media" to refer to signal conductors, including copper wire, optic fiber, microwaves, radio waves, infrared, and so on. These are examples of "transmission media". A piece of copper wire is a transmission medium. But I have read countless articles by educated engineers in reputable professional journals in which "media" is used incorrectly, as a singular noun, as if a single router port were attached to multiple copper and fiber optic cables and transmitting radio and micro waves simulanteously. The engineers would surely agree that this is impossible, if the grammar of what they had written were explained to them. Slap dash writing. Slap dash editing. The distinctions are worth preserving. People learn a language by listening and reading. If what they read and hear is corrupt, they learn a corrupted language, all the while thinking it to be correct. That is how solecisms propagate and become established in common usage. And when distinctions are lost, loss of precision is not far behind. I do agree that there are mechanisms in spoken English (tone of voice, gesture, etc.), where written language "has instead such devices as punctuation, typography (capitalization and italics), and the ability to employ a more complex sentence structure to clarify meaning." For example, "he only died last week" is perfectly acceptable in spoken English because the pitch of the voice naturally rises after "only" in spoken English, clarifying the meaning. But in written English it should be "he died only last week"--otherwise a pedant might conclude that he did nothing else all last week but die (slowly), rather than that it was only a week ago that he died. But I digress.