The Evolution of the English Devolution
Ingles para Everybody
As a writer, I enjoy languages. I like those things that go around the internet such as: Why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways? I’m sure every language has them. In Portuguese bota calças e calça botas (same words - reverse order) means put on pants and put on boots.
Fun is one thing, but changing the language is quite another. A few years ago I noticed that my Portuguese-speaking friends on Facebook were referencing the “niver” of so-and-so. I realized that “anniversario” (birthday) had been shortened to “niver”. Used in a sentence it would sound like: I went to the birth of my friend who turned 55. When I see this word, it is like the proverbial nails on a chalkboard to me - I find it incredibly irritating.
Why does it irritate me, I wonder. Is it because I learned to spell the whole long word and pronounce it and so should today’s youth. Just like, I walked uphill both ways in the snow to get to school (in south Texas) and so should my children. To be honest, I drove my kids to school the majority of their school days and I was happy to do it - those were special times in the car and good conversations.
Anyway…I’m sure this happens in any language - they evolve. But is it really evolution when it just gets shorter. School is over but I’m still thinking about the English that some of my students use when writing. I look at their papers and listen to them talk and wonder what is happening to our language.
I think it all started last year when a girl told me she liked my “fit”. It took me a while before I understood she was talking about my “outfit”. Initially I viewed this as too lazy to say the whole word.
The trend continued into writing. My students don’t write a whole lot because of the online nature of the Discipline campus. Recently I had an occasion to see a written response from one of my stronger students. He regularly spelled words like “where” as “wher”. In my spare time I began a small, internal panic that this high school student, and many others, couldn’t even spell basic words. What did this mean for the future of business and communication? Apparently auto-correct and predictive text are not teaching anything via osmosis!
I’ll admit, I can be a stickler for rules and order. And the idea of devolution scares me a bit. How can we be both simultaneously evolving with better assistive technology and trending backwards in educational level and basic skills? DO I WAN TO LIV N A WURL WHER LETRS DROP OUT OF WERDS LIK LEAFS OFF A TRE IN ACTOBER?
Fune think iz…oops, I mean - Funny thing is, this sort of phenomenon has been happening since the beginning of language. Language evolves. Imagine how the cavemen felt when their system of grunts evolved into longer, more formal words. I think it must have felt similar to how many adults feel when they hear teen-speak. All these new fangled words that sound different.
1,000 years later the Anglo-Saxon’s Old English absorbed many foreign words from French and Latin. Perhaps the traditionalists wondered who was qualified to organize these changes. The very words qualified and organized being additions from Latin and French.
Another time of great change in language came during the 15th - 17th centuries when printing became more prolific (also a word of Latin origin). This led to the standardisation / standardization of spelling.
In fact, if you read a lot you will already have noticed that word choice and spelling is a great way for an author to indicate time and place. A story set in the 1990’s would talk about using a computer program and a story set thirty years later would talk about using an app.
Similarly, Shakespeare added contractions that weren’t common usage to fit his iambic pentameter and Dickens was accused of using “low-class” language. Many of his characters were peasants, so he wrote like they would speak.
Today people of all ages take low class language and shorten it even more. In my work group, a large portion of our communication is via text. The other day I asked my boss a question and he replied “idk”. (the abbreviation for I don’t know) Ten years ago I would have thought that was an extremely unprofessional response. Last week, it communicated all the information I needed in order to make a decision and plan my next step.
And at the end of the day, that’s what is important - that the message we are sending is the message received. Being multilingual, I learned a long time ago that what’s important is not always precise word choice but getting the right message across. (OK - I might have been embarrassed once in Spanish when I tried to say I was embarrassed and wound up saying I was pregnant. In that case precise word choice was important.) But when I make a joke with a student, and another student says, “Ooh, Ms. Golla, you clocked him.” - I know my joke was successful, even though “clocked” is a recent evolution of language and to my older ears does not seem like the right word.
If you ever think English is not a weird language just remember that
read and lead rhyme and read and lead rhyme.
But read and lead don't rhyme, and neither do read and lead.