It's official: English has lost the battle and the war.
[via Taccuino di traduzione]
There are so many threats to the survival of good, plain English that it is not easy to be optimistic. Email has a great deal to answer for. Punctuation is no longer required and verbs are abandoned with the speed of a striptease artiste late for her next performance. Text messaging is worse - much worse. Yet I have seen it suggested that students be allowed to use "texting" abbreviations in examinations. Ultimately, no doubt, we shall communicate with a series of grunts - and the evolutionary wheel will have turned full circle.
[John Humpries. "Not I. It's me." A review of James Cochrane's new book Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English in the Guardian.]
Sigh. All the arguments, all the churn, all in vain. Sometimes I feel like I'm in that Gary Larson cartoon: "Bla bla bla, language changes, bla bla bla." Oh, well, dammit! Grunt!
[Addendum 10/23/03: Good old Des has proposed a solution to this vexing problem:
My suggestion that we inaugurate a discipline called "folk linguistics" (parallel to "folk psychology") to study the random nonsense persons are apt to believe about language have so fallen on stony ground, but it would surely be more interesting than the usual counterdenunciations—and what better way to thwart Language Mavens than to stop trying to counter their "arguments" and start classifying them instead? It would drive them apoplectic with rage, I promise you!
We could start an organization called, say, the International Association of Folk Linguistics, but the all important acronym IAFL has been taken. Well, maybe we can come up with a good acronym at our first meeting. I'll put out the Call later this week. I think we could even get the Canoodle Princessor to be an honorary royal member if we ask real nice and all in Scandawegian.]
Posted by jim at October 21, 2003 08:56 AM | TrackBackYeah, I just went through that on MetaFilter. Yet another "English is going to the dogs! What does 'to leverage' mean??" post. I sighed and wrote this ("...don't you realize that if language really degraded, we'd all be grunting unintelligibly at each other by now? People have been deploring such 'decline' for centuries, and yet somehow languages survive..." yada yada). I thought my work was done, but then somebody referred to a book that claimed "Woe is me" should properly be "Woe is I" (!!), so I had to make another comment. But it makes no difference. Nobody listens.
*commits seppuku*