SubscribeStandard American English: In an age when the POTUS uses weak vernacular for the word "nuclear," is mine just a lost cause?And that's just the spelling and punctuation, nevermind grammar or style.
I'm worried about speech. I like to say "a car" instead of "uh car"; "the car" instead of "thuh car"; and "because" and not "becuz."
This would be easier if I could illustrate the long and short vowels.
I know it's not always necessary or appropriate; but when I'm reading to a group of kids, I like to sound like I know what I'm doing. It really hit home when my 1st grader came home telling me that his teacher said that if you say "the" and it sounds like "thee," that's stupid.
Is it time for me to give up on what I've learned about speaking and writing words meant to be spoken?
Languagehat, got your ears on?
The world has been hastening towards its imminent end for as long as anyone cares to remember, and language with it. Not only does language always change, but if one is to believe the authorities, it always changes for the worse. 'Tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration,' declared Samuel Johnson in the introduction to his Dictionary of the English Language.(That's from a lively and knowledgeable new book, The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher.) I suspect most of us who care passionately about words went through a phase, like dhartung and myself, where we got indignant about whatever shibboleths we'd absorbed a feeling for, and that's entirely understandable; one of the main things they do in first-year linguistics classes is knock it out of you by showing you in detail how language changes and (at least as important) that it changes—constantly and unstoppably. It's natural to want to preserve the variety we're familiar with, but it's like trying to keep the tide from moving out.
The critics of the English language today are divided on the question of who is to blame for its current ills: the headline-hungry press, sound-biting politicians, or the slovenly habits of the young. But they are all united by the conviction that English is in a parlous state. What a falling-off was there, from the English of even just two generations ago, in the good old days when – as a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement recently reminisced – ‘a mistake was a mistake and not a sign of free expression’.
That may be so, but it was not quite the opinion of the ‘authorities’ in those good old days. In 1946, for instance, George Orwell (about whom it was once said that he could not blow his nose without moralizing on conditions in the handkerchief industry) wrote in the journal Horizon: 'most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way'. A bad way compared of course to the language of previous generations, which was purer and more correct than the English of his own time. Perhaps, but had Orwell consulted his predecessors, he would have encountered different sentiments. In 1848, a century before Orwell’s article, the renowned linguist August Schleicher dismissed the English of his day as the most ‘ground-down’ of all the Germanic languages. English only showed 'how rapidly the language of a nation important both in history and literature can sink', and it was improbable that 'from such language-ruins the whole edifice will be raised anew'. Instead, he added gloomily, the language is likely to 'sink into mono-syllabicity'.
Or take this chilling prediction of impending doom: 'The greatest improprieties … are to be found among people of fashion; many pronuncia¬tions, which thirty or forty years ago were confined to the vulgar, are gradually gaining ground; and if something [is] not done to stop this growing evil ... English is likely to become a mere jargon.' Everyone has read such sentiments expressed in countless letters to broadsheet editors, so there is nothing especially surprising about this particular one, except, perhaps, that it was written some threescore years and ten before Schleicher’s proclamation, in 1780, by one Thomas Sheridan (actor, advocate of correct elocution, and father of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan). What Sheridan found most galling was that the decline of English was of such recent origin, since according to him, only seventy years earlier, 'during the reign of Queen Anne [1702–14] … it is probable that English was … spoken in its highest state of perfection'.
Really? The cognoscenti at the time would have begged to differ. Right in the middle of Queen Anne’s reign, Jonathan Swift embarked on what would go down in posterity as one of the most astoundingly bigoted rants in the distinguished history of this genre. His 1712 ‘Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue’ starts with the following fanfare: 'I do here, in the Name of all the Learned and Polite Persons of the Nation, complain ... that our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions ...' and that’s only the beginning. So the English of today is not what it used to be, but then again, it never was.
posted by ikkyu2 at 8:27 PM on July 8, 2005