The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
oh my word!
On August 15 1995 the English language changed.
The launch of the Microsoft Windows 95 operating system triggered wildfire growth in home computer ownership, and therefore also in the frequency of written communications.
Emails, texts, tweets, and online comments now vastly dwarf the number of letters people used to send. Never in history have so many people contacted each other.
Consequently, we are living through a paradigm shift in the evolution of our language. English is changing faster than ever before.
Tomorrow’s historians will study us, and this will be deeply embarrassing.
You see, it might have been expected that this change would herald a golden age for the English language. Surely people would want to be perfectly understood, to write vibrant prose, to command an argute vocabulary.
The opposite happened. We invented textspeak. We created acronyms like LOL, ROFL and OMG. As phone technology improved, little yellow faces called emoticons, with smiles, frowns and other indeterminate expressions, appeared. It is a laughably inadequate way to communicate.
The language is under attack.
In this column, I intend to champion proper English.
This will not be an exercise in impenetrable orthography, nor, I hope, ever a dry lecture in stochastic grammar. It will be a celebration of plain English of the type learned in the three Rs.
I will, among many things, complain about apostrophe usage and people attempting to emphasise their opinions by using words they clearly don’t know the definition of.
I revere and respect our language. I admire its beauty and versatility.
I believe “dappled” is one of its most beautiful words. I am fascinated by idioms and idiolects. I have a partisan opinion on the Oxford Comma. I feel sorrow when I see “under way” as one word.
I’m a native of Courier Country. I grew up hearing and using the same words as you, and was taught to put them into sentences the same way you were. I’m no linguistics professor, but have worked with the language, as a journalist and author, for almost 40 years.
I have a love-hate relationship with dictionaries, I have a reasoned (though possibly controversial) view on written Scots.
I will welcome comment and suggestion, I will accept criticism, I will listen to opposing views.
It’s nice to have met you.
See you here next week.