LSSU has been issuing the list since 1976 and although it usually makes me smile in agreement and makes me feel validated as a curmudgeon of worth, nothing really changes. Americans are so infatuated with baby-talk and with sounding like the other illiterates trying to seem hip or educated or even oneness with the masses they're not easily persuaded that working "selfie" or cray-cray into every line is just plain stupid or that it's time to stop demanding that we "have a conversation" as a euphemism for "shut up and listen."
Of course these little infatuations do fade eventually. Starting a sentence with so will go the way of starting a sentence with "say" and fewer sentences will be larded with "like" as they were in the 1990's. But you cant be sure. Both affect and effect are gone forever it seems, and no one sends invitations any more. It's nearly certain however, that words that sound similar will continue to undergo a kind of syncretism. Our grandchildren will tell us to "annunciate" our words and to assault our ears with other false congnates while English Teachers nod approvingly and the American vocabulary will continue to swell like cheap sausage with inert ingredients and other stuffing. It's just Cray-Cray.
But not all of us will go gently into that confused darkness. LSSU and I, like Quixote and Panza will go on as America hashtags and twerks itself into an epic fail.
Almost every night I watch a local news program called -- actually I can't remember what it's called, the program follows the PBS News Hour with Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff. At the end of the local news program, the host brings on an editor of the Boston Globe to tell the viewers what the next day's important stories will be. Without exception, this Boston Globe editor begins each report with "So..." I've been watching this program for over a year, and he's never failed to "So..." this story and that story to death. I've been too lazy to write in to complain, or maybe too afraid to be seen as a conversational dinosaur.
ReplyDeleteThis is why we can't have nice things.
So, y'know, like, I'll just keep these peeves to myself.
Thank you. I was beginning to think it was just me.
ReplyDeleteYou shouldn't. Giving in to the dumbing down and degradation of language is giving in to the degradation and dumbing down of culture. It's becoming a slob's paradise in all respects, including politics and the growing uselessness of language to express anything subtle or nuanced or even anything complex isn't only the result of mob rule, of slob rule -- it's the tool of oppression.
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