A few months back, I read this article from the Boston Globe about people apologizing for using a word that isn’t a real word.
It used to be that every time I heard people slaughtering my mother tongue an awful twinge went up my spine. Every misplaced apostrophe, any misuse of they’re, their, or there, every double negative…torture. I’m over it now, though. Perhaps I was defeated and gave up caring. But I like to think that I became enlightened, forgiving, and understanding.
English is a crazy, nonsensical, and incredibly complicated patchwork of a language. So why was I surprised when people butchered it? The thing is that language is a tool used to communicate meaning and ideas. It’s not like I didn’t understand them. So I lightened up and began to revel in the wacky ways people used my language.
Verbing of nouns
The business world is chock-full of entertaining new words. My wife is marinated in office-speak every day, so it’s understandable that she brings some of it home. My favorite example that she used (I’m going to get in trouble for this) was an extrapolation of the verbing of the noun, “office”. She deals with people across the country, and it’s not uncommon to have to determine where one “offices” or where one works. It’s in common usage. So one day we were talking about medicine for some reason, perhaps the medical professional that she normally saw switched clinics or something. I don’t recall. What I DO recall is that out of her mouth came the wonderful sentence, “She used to be in Edina, but now she doctors in Eden Prairie.” I thought it was great.
Language is evolving
I believe that our language is a living, evolving thing. Grammatical rules should be viewed less as static laws and more like…recommended uses for optimal communication. The rules came into being because enough people agreed that that was the way that it should be. But by the same token, if enough people agree that “brung” is the correct past tense of “bring”, then that becomes the rule. And I know places where this has already happened.
This summer, I came across one of the coolest things ever: a 2003 study of the evolution of our language called “FUTURESE: The American Language in 3000 AD” that takes a shot at estimating what our language will look like in 1000 years.
Predicting the future of the English language is rather easy, in the short term. The odds are, over the next few decades its New World dialects are going to gain increasing global dominance, accelerating the demise of thousands of less fortunate languages but at long last allowing a single advertisement to reach everybody in the world. Then after a century or two of US dominance some other geopolitical grouping will gain the ascendancy, everyone will learn Chechen or Patagonian or whatever it is, and history will continue as usual. Ho hum. But apart from that… what might the language actually look like in a thousand years time?
I love this stuff.
Links
Chillax: If it works like a word, just use it (Boston Globe)
So, my aunt passed along to me “Partridge’s Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English.” It’s got such gems as “buggerlugs,” “like a nun in a knocking-shop,” and “molly-dooker,” (“A not necessarily offensive term of address, mainly nautical,” “incongruous, inappropriate and utterly out-of-place,” and “a left-handed person.”) In the interests of ridding my house of 365 things this year, might I pass it along to you? Email or DM me your address & I’ll pop it in the mail, if you want it.
I would disagree with the concept that one language will rise to supremacy.
Say English wins out, even if just for a while. Even if someone technically speaks English there are so many sub-cultural dialects and sets of slang. Ebonics, the Queen’s English, Irish brogue, New York Cab driver, etc. Hell, even the Marine’s have their own dialect. I would give you a sample but grunts and pointing don’t translate to the written word well and, beside, I have no poop to fling so my accent would be terrible.
These slang dialects can be so different from each other that it can damn near impossible to communicate between groups without loosing much of the nuance and meaning of the words.
As long as there is a human drive to maintain an “us” and a “them,” which barring an alien attack I don’t think will change, people will introduce novel features into how they talk to help tell the difference between the two. The distance between these groups geographically, socio-economically, etc will probably correlate to the difficulty in communication.