I think you may be from the same era as me, but I think you’re trying to fight a battle you’re highly likely to lose. I was taught that spelling mattered and grammar mattered and that the choice of particular words mattered. If I wrote something with spelling and grammar mistakes, or just something that the teacher thought was cr*p then I’d probably get a blackboard eraser thrown at me at high velocity.
Nowadays my teenage step-son tells me that I speak and write in ‘old people language’ and I know for sure that he talks and writes unintelligible gibberish most of the time. I discuss journalistic standards with my mid-20’s sons and decry the inability of ‘journalists’ to spell or use common grammar or write headlines that make sense without having to read them 20 times. They tell me not to worry, the people aren’t journalists, they’re digital copywriters who’s entire being exists to generate copy as quickly as possible to draw clicks from people to make their digital empire appear at the top of the click tables. Apparently using spelling or grammar checkers slows the whole process down too much.
In a world that has evolved since the fountain pen on paper, and succint and easily understandable phone calls on very expensive phone systems (if you even had a phone) that we grew up in, the subtleties of single vs double quotes and nuances about whether some words are slightly more offensive than others is long lost on many of the online population.
In summary, if it behaves like a lurker and it doesn’t write like an active participant then it’s a lurker - whatever other words you choose to represent them instead. If you call them a ‘non-active participant’, most readers will translate it in their head to read ‘lurker’ and not worry one iota about the use of the ‘L’ word.
