The use of "foreground" as a verb in that article really bothers me for some reason.
For a good discussion and some links to background, see this recent Language Log post: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=16394
* I restricted my assertion to English because I don't know one way or the other if other languages tend to this sort of evolution. My impression is that particular languages tend to be open to some types of changes and less open to others, but that which changes varies from language to language.