More mangled English

Well, just one more post on the last day of the year.

This is meant to vent my scorn, as a teacher and lover of the English language, on the way it is being mangled by a lot of new-fangled silliness and worse, what we call nyakami and dhong in Bengali. Not the first time I am writing in this vein, nor will this be the last. This post is meant only for those who share my love and respect.

These days it is not enough to talk about 'new' things any more - I suppose because novelties come a dime a dozen every day - so we must gush about 'newer' things: newer fashion wear, newer technology, newer political ideas. Likewise with 'lesser' (and the biggest culprits are journalists, who massacre the language out of both ignorance and careless hurry, probably knowing that it doesn't matter, since their readers are mostly as careless and distracted as they are): few people seem to know any more that less and lesser mean quite different things. 'My father earns less than me' is okay to say; so is, grammatically speaking, 'non-vertebrates are lesser creatures', meaning inferior; but 'I have lesser luggage than you' is meaningless. Nowadays, also, some people can only talk about 'older' people; simply calling us senior citizens 'old' supposedly 'hurts our feelings'. I don't know which morons think so, young or old, but I daresay most of our generation is too mature to be 'hurt' by such trivialities, thank you very much.

I have kept the very worst example for the last. In a recent interview, a journalist (yes, again) asked an elderly musician 'How young are you?' This beggars comment, so I shall leave it there, just hoping that none of my acquaintances ever use such English with me. I would be as offended as if someone referred to me as 'they' instead of he.

I am thankful to all those readers who have taken the page view count beyond 900,000, so that I can seriously look forward to crossing the million mark fairly soon. Some of them, I guess, have been with me for many years at a stretch: I shall be glad if they tell me so, even with one-line comments. Meanwhile, have a very happy New Year ahead, all.