Language change - revisited...

[JIBZ at aol.com]

Dan Slobin writes:
"Between you and I" is hardly a recent change.  The New York Times
criticized Bill Clinton in his first election campaign for saying, "I
hope you'll vote for Al Gore and I."  I hear it used routinely by
academic colleagues in their 50s and younger at Berkeley.  A similar
longstanding conjunction is the use of "me and Bill" in subject position
(as opposed to "Bill and I").  There's been a good deal of linguistic
writing about these forms in English.  I doubt that they are particularly
"adolescent."

Innovative extensions of evaluative terms are also not limited to
adolescence.  Consider, for example, the spread of "arguably" in academic
and media discourse to mean something like "(probably) definitely."

- -Dan Slobin

Sorry to all if the allied example I used to illustrate yet another general
shift of usage from '...who opened the door...' to '...that opened the
door...' confused you.  Of course 'between you and I' has been around for a
long time just as 'they' in the construction 'everyone said they had enough
to eat' to avoid the he/she selection.  However, I think I qualified my
example by indicating its general usage.
One example of adolescent slang which intrigues me is the use of 'dis' to
represent, I'm told, 'disrespect' as in 'you dissed (sp?) me and I don't like
it'.  Another such beauty is 'rad' for 'radical'.  Has anyone done any study
addressing the use of these monosyllabics?
J. Betz