A fluid language in free fall

Forsooth, English hath forsaken its dignity

As some of you may know, I am not a stickler when it comes to the English language.

Beyond striving for clarity and brevity, I don’t worry about rules my mother and my elementary schoolteachers insisted on.

All languages are fluid. Those that aren’t do not survive.

Let’s f ace it, with a language as widely used and successful as English, rules are being broken by the day.

And in a world that often communicates by social media or by text message, it’s accelerating by the minute.

Spelling doesn’t seem to matter any more.

And formality has been all but thrown out the window.

I long ago stopped taking offence from those who haven’t taken the time to check a spelling, or even from those who have forsaken capital letters at the beginning of a sentence, or any semblance of punctuation.

For example, I still begin some emails like this: Dear Ms Smith, It was a pleasure speaking to you at our meeting of Wednesday last. Further to our conversation, please forward the information you referenced regarding ...

But I am more likely to receive one like this: r u gunna .;/ flip m thAt s t9uff ? OK, everyone is in a rush. No time for spell checking or punctuation. Fine. Although there seems time enough for emoticons and emojis.

And I admit, I am still getting used to writers who take the time to USE all KINDS of CAPITAL LETTERS for no particular reason in their correspondence and social media postings. SAD!

Even in speech the language has become more informal, more casual.

Politicians have been mangling English for centuries, but they’ve really picked up the pace in recent years — talking too much and saying too little.

The alarming thing is that it seems to work. Many voters seem to like politicians who can’t seem to put a sentence together.

I can’t say what it’s like for other languages, but we may be at a crossroads in English.

Are we reaching the point where the language is changing so fast we cannot keep up, where English is losing its effectiveness and efficiency? Are people covering up their illiteracy with modern technological quirks? Is it all just becoming a word jumble in an alphabet soup?

As much as I have reason to be concerned, I may simply be oldfashioned and out of touch, like my dear mother and blessed elementary schoolteachers.

After all, the editors of this newspaper 150 years ago would barely understand this column. They accuse me of that same illiteracy I accuse others of today.

They would find my sentences too short, my vocabulary limited, my syntax all wrong, my storytelling annoyingly casual ...

And their predecessors would say the same of them: “Forsooth, thou has’t lacking valour in language arts. Prithee leaveth.”

Which today might be expressed thusly: “You’re writing sucks. Get out.”