The vapors sweep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan
-Tennyson-
Every year at this time I let Doctor Syntax out of the Vicarage and let him raise hell with the way we've ruined the greatest language on Earth: spray painted it like an old abandoned subway car, put it up on blocks and stolen the wheels and made it all but impossible to have an intelligent conversation because, like one of those German Enigma machines, every word seems to change meaning every time it's used.
Every year brings the same references to "language police" because you know it's true and you know we're guilty of polluting the minds of millions with silly, balbative portmanteau words like Ginormous or Sexting, our relentless verbing of nouns like texting and friending and our instant acceptance of every cliche metaphor, metastatic Malapropism, stupid solecism and yes, with every pusillanimous political polemic we pass along.
No, if conservative, liberal, reactionary, fascist, anarchist, Marxist, royalist, and Fascist are all used interchangeably, we might as well stop talking, legislating, voting and adjudicating and take up arms. And we do.
Every year, as our vocabularies atrophy, we make up words or as our overuse of superlatives diminishes them, as our misuse erases them, we have to invent new ones. After all,
when your skate board or your X-Box is awesome, you simply can't discuss how you felt when you saw that Hubble picture of some distant nebula, now can you? What happens to the real verb "to befriend" when it's more fashionably idiotic to "friend" someone or worse, toBFF them? It dies quickly of course and any real dictionary these days is a virtual Arlington of fallen words.There's a college up in Michigan, Lake Superior State University, that's been putting out an annual list of words that need to die for 35 years. I'm afraid the school will die before they have any results to show. In fact if we still have universities in 35 years I have to wonder whether they'll be teaching in Standard English in the way medieval Universities taught in Latin, while business and popular pursuits are conducted in some 'consumerized' argot or vulgate designed to boost sales and befuddle customers while the general population can't read Hemingway, much less Tennyson any more.
No, I'm not the language police. The real language police are the people who tell you you're a racist if you call an Asian tiger or bear an Asiatic tiger or bear -- or that you may never end a sentence with a preposition. No, I just love English and as you know I love wordplay and the inventive use of words. In principle I don't object to such silliness as "chillaxin," the compound of two bits of dialect; chillin' and relaxin' but only in principle and never when used by some underage hipster with a two thousand word vocabulary. I even thought the short lived "not so much" routine was cute for a few moments, but that's the thing: with fish, house guests, metaphors and the Macarena; after three days one notices a smell. At least I do. Maybe it's time you did too.
Yes, I agree that "shovel-ready" is shovel ready for burial; I agree that it's time to stop calling every adviser a Czar. I am sick unto death at the "app app app app" that I hear quacked out at the phone store, butLSSU's 15 words are not enough nor does the list expose the inverted elitism behind our linguistic cacophony. We may have majored in English at the best schools, but in our HowdyDoody hearts we know it's bad to be grown up and embarrassing to sound educated and so we try ever so hard to sound like the baggy pants crowd who know just how the really cool kids talk in the penitentiaries and crack houses. We always fail at it of course, because those kids change their jargon faster than we can.
As I said, I only do this once a year and that's because it's useless, of course. It only lets me vent some excess steam pressure, to rant against the dying of the light. I know that "impact" will ever hence mean affect and effect and influence and inform and not be just a carrion metaphor. I know that those words are gone forever from popular parlance and that this little rant will be as hard for my grandchildren to read as Chaucer. Hell, animated video clips may have replaced the written word altogether by then and the University of
My candidates for elimination in 2010:
ReplyDelete“Epic fail.” Is “failure” really so hard to say? Is the extra syllable too much work? Is the failure in question genuinely of epic dimensions -- say, on the order of the destruction of the Roman Republic?
“Oh, wait …[insert trivial observation or mocking question].” Trollish phrase often used by constipated, mean-spirited dullards aiming to pass for clever. “So how’s that hope and change workin’ out for ya? Oh, wait….” See what I mean?
“Scary.” This one’s for the under-seven age group, no? Instant self-infantilization. There are many good words to characterize what is disturbing, unsettling, frightening, and so forth. Not to use them where appropriate does a disservice to the language.
It's linguistic evolution. If you go back and read contemporary writers of the late 19th/early 20th century you'll find that words like 'scientist' were considered neologisms ('men of science' was the more socially acceptable term).. 'airplane' was 'aeroplane'-and I don't know the ascii code to put in the umlaut over the e- people telephoned each other, because 'calling' referred to showing up at their house and knocking on their door..
ReplyDelete..language changes and evolves as fast as society does, or even faster.
Personally the grammar bits don't bother me too much. I live in rural NC where grammar is low on the general priority list anyway. What DOES bother me is this 'internet language' a la I Can Has Cheezburger. I can NOT tolerate the U/UR/2Day/BFF (etc) abbreviations and the intentional idiocy. That stuff drives me batshit crazy.
Maybe I'm alone in discriminating between decay and evolution, but I'm sticking to this quest, no matter how Quixotic.
ReplyDeleteThe no longer so neo neologism "scientist" is an example of evolution, the confusion of enormity and enormousness is not and it deprives of us of a single, unique, useful word that now needs to be replaced by a less accurate phrase or short sentence. That's not evolution any more than sloppy and unreadable handwriting is evolution. Orwell, I think, was quite right in showing how such decay serves those who manipulate and thwarts those who analyze. The fewer the pixels, the harder it is to see what's in the picture and the easier to make it look like anything one wants. I think the same applies to vocabulary.
When we have only left and right to apply to all things scientific, political, sociological, we can't have meaningful or productive discussions -- and of course, we see this every day.
Speaking of Southernisms -- is it a reflection of our neoconfederate politics that we're becoming a tonal language? Since when did invitation give way to IN-vite, or insurance to IN-shurns? Why do we put up a deFENCE everywhere but in football where it's DEE-fense? I heard someone from above the Mason Dixon say "I might could go" the other day -- and people ask me why I carry a gun!
Actually the recent telephone text message abbreviations are evolutionary adaptations to the use of the crudest-yet-invented method of producing text. Morse is easily ten times faster, but telegraphers have long used shorthand - a better one. Of course these kids don't know it, or much of anything actually. Still, it irritates me is when it bleeds over into other media and poses as hipness.
Why do we need to talk as though every letter, every silly syllable is an unwanted expense? Beats me. I almost fired someone many years ago for ending a business letter with "any questions call." I still get letters like that and from people who have degrees in communications. Apparently it's illegal to kill people for it and that's a damned shame.
In my not so humble cephalopod opinion, 2010 should be the year of proper punctuation. There are paws at the end of claws (not vice versa); semicolons need no Viagra ™; and Data are not a sentient robotic entity on Star Trek, but a plural noun in all forms and appearances.
ReplyDeleteSatyavati devi dasi, hold down the ALT key and type 0235 to make ë.
ReplyDelete"Epic fail" is one of those chat room-born phrases that attains the status of internet meme; so while I forgive its use, I prefer the word that already lay in the direction of their grasping: "fiasco."
I'm actually less offended by these crowd-generated terms and phrases than the ones we hear from official mouths all the time. For instance, were I the linguistic dictator for five minutes I would ban the phrase "mistakes were made." This has to be the most insidious three-word abomination in public discourse. Not only is it passive, as if the mistakes just happened all on their own without a human agent, it also puts them in the past -- as if to suggest their irrelevance. It's a weasel's phrase.
In other words, it is not the epic fail that offends me, but the mistakes that were made.
Consult the grammar Nazis at Oatmeal and at bioephemera.
ReplyDeleteI'd rather not. I'd rather have people realize that grammar is as important in language as it is in math and if you keep saying idiocies like "the reason why is" you're saying something that doesn't mean anything. As grammar decays through ignorance, our ability to communicate lessens and we have to depend on tones and expression and context and facial twitches -- and for a cephalopod, a facial twitch means there's a whole lot of shakin' goin' on.
ReplyDelete