[lg policy] Goodbye, cruel words: English. It's dead to me.

[Dave Sayers]

"The regard formerly paid to pronunciation has been generally declining; 
so that now the greatest improprieties in that point are to be found 
among people of fashion; many pronunciations which thirty or forty years 
ago were confined to the vulgar, are now gaining ground; and if 
something be not done to stop this growing evil, and fix a general 
standard at present, the English is likely to become a mere jargon, 
which every one may pronounce as he pleases."

 From the introduction to Michael Sheridan's 'A General Dictionary of 
the English Language', published in 1780.

Dave

--
Dr. Dave Sayers
Honorary Research Fellow
College of Arts & Humanities
and Language Research Centre
Swansea University
dave.sayers at cantab.net
http://swansea.academia.edu/DaveSayers/About


On 19:59, Harold Schiffman wrote:
> Goodbye, cruel words: English. It's dead to me.
>
> By Gene Weingarten
> Sunday, September 19, 2010; W44
>
>
>
> The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to
> become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the
> dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead. It succumbed
> last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness. It is survived by
> an ignominiously diminished form of itself.
>
> The end came quietly on Aug. 21 on the letters page of The Washington
> Post. A reader castigated the newspaper for having written that Sasha
> Obama was the "youngest" daughter of the president and first lady,
> rather than their "younger" daughter. In so doing, however, the letter
> writer called the first couple the "Obama's." This, too, was
> published, constituting an illiterate proofreading of an illiterate
> criticism of an illiteracy. Moments later, already severely weakened,
> English died of shame.
>
> The language's demise took few by surprise. Signs of its failing
> health had been evident for some time on the pages of America's daily
> newspapers, the flexible yet linguistically authoritative forums
> through which the day-to-day state of the language has traditionally
> been measured. Beset by the need to cut costs, and influenced by
> decreased public attention to grammar, punctuation and syntax in an
> era of unedited blogs and abbreviated instant communication, newspaper
> publishers have been cutting back on the use of copy editing,
> sometimes eliminating it entirely.
>
> In the past year alone, as the language lay imperiled, the ironically
> clueless misspelling "pronounciation" has been seen in the Boston
> Globe, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Deseret Morning News,
> Washington Jewish Week and the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times, where it
> appeared in a correction that apologized for a previous
> mispronunciation.
>
> On Aug. 6, the very first word of an article in the Winston-Salem
> (N.C.) Journal was "Alot," which the newspaper employed to estimate
> the number of Winston-Salemites who would be vacationing that month.
>
> The Lewiston (Maine) Sun-Journal has written of "spading and
> neutering." The Miami Herald reported on someone who "eeks out a
> living" -- alas, not by running an amusement-park haunted house. The
> Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star described professional football as a
> "doggy dog world." The Vallejo (Calif.) Times-Herald and the South
> Bend (Ind.) Tribune were the two most recent papers, out of dozens, to
> report on the treatment of "prostrate cancer."
>
> Observers say, however, that no development contributed more
> dramatically to the death of the language than the sudden and
> startling ubiquity of the vomitous verbal construction "reach out to"
> as a synonym for "call on the phone," or "attempt to contact." A
> jargony phrase bloated with bogus compassion -- once the province only
> of 12-step programs and sensitivity training seminars -- "reach out
> to" is now commonplace in newspapers. In the last half-year, the New
> York Times alone has used it more than 20 times in a number of
> contextually indefensible ways, including to report that the
> Blagojevich jury had asked the judge a question.
>
> It was not immediately clear to what degree the English language will
> be mourned, or if it will be mourned at all. In the United States,
> English has become increasingly irrelevant, particularly among young
> adults. Once the most popular major at the nation's leading colleges
> and universities, it now often trails more pragmatic disciplines, such
> as economics, politics, government, and, ironically, "communications,"
> which increasingly involves learning to write mobile-device-friendly
> ads for products like Cheez Doodles.
>
> Many people interviewed for this obituary appeared unmoved by the
> news, including Anthony Incognito of Crystal City, a typical man in
> the street.
>
> "Between you and I," he said, "I could care less."
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/13/AR2010091304476_pf.html
>
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