As I have said here and aloud to many face to face, the English language has been one of the deepest and most abiding loves of my life.
I started early, and read widely and well. There was a time when, partly for professional reasons and partly out of just the hunger for learning and fascination with history and literature, I read as far back as King Alfred's Domesday Book and the great legend of Beowulf (late first millennium CE - they had to be read from heavily annotated texts, and read like a foreign language, so different was English then), proceeded through Chaucer, when English was becoming faintly recognisable, then Shakespeare and the King James Bible, when it was becoming 'modern' as scholars call it, through the days of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Ruskin, Dickens, Wilde, Hardy, Shaw, Wells, Chesterton right into the middle of the 20th century, when absolutely first rate writers became so numerous and wrote magnificently in so many different genres from adventure thrillers and mystery stories to psychological studies and grand fantasy that merely making a list of all of them that I can remember having read and been deeply influenced by would be an exhausting business, and there would be no point to it anyway. So that is how I came to learn English, the English that I love, admire, respect, and have spent a lifetime teaching thousands at high school level and college, some of them quite extraordinarily gifted minds, while ceaselessly polishing up my own grasp of it. And that English, to my great chagrin and despair, is being rapidly debauched, mutilated and impoverished at a breathtaking pace of late, right in front of my eyes. This post is to express my resultant helpless anguish.
The degeneration is happening at many levels simultaneously. Lots of people, not just high-school goers and not just in India, cannot distinguish between its and it's any more, or there and their. They use articles and prepositions randomly, as the fancy chooses them (I have seen the same person writing different from in one place and different than or different to a few paragraphs later). Tenses have taken on a life of their own, and people drift quite unconsciously between them in the same sentence (His father was dead, who says that...), and so it is with number, so it seems quite alright to many people to write 'The mobile phone is a very useful invention, they have made life easier'. Use of capital letters has become equally meaningless and random, and sensible paragraph division a lost art, except perhaps if you are a diplomat or lawyer, when such things still matter, though I am not sure how much longer, when Presidents post crude and semi-literate stuff on twitter in the name of policy announcements. Most people cannot distinguish between shall and will any more, nor what difference there is between, say, advice and advise. 'The Americans don't know and don't care, so why should we?', seems to be the commonest defence, the next in popularity being 'We are too busy to mind such things' (though Churchill in his seventies was not, he did not have a word processor to help him write, and he was merely fighting a world war on the side, while Michelangelo long before him said 'Trifles lead to perfection, and perfection is not a trifle'). Third comes the accusation that we who still insist on such fine points are 'elitist' (as if that is a wholly bad thing, as if the same should be said about people who insist on washing their hands before and after meals) or mere martinets, even 'grammar Nazis' (if only such people knew what the ideals and methods of real Nazis were!)
I mentioned crudeness in the last paragraph. Both literature and cinema have descended to the coarsest vulgarity as if that is now the norm, using cuss words and wanton abuse where they serve no purpose at all except to make the still-civilized reader/viewer cringe with disgust. Is it meant to reflect the current social reality in most English speaking countries? Well then, thank God I won't ever have to visit them. But why do we here in India, by some yardsticks the third largest English speaking country in the world, frantically emulate the worst that we can find in the US and UK? Even fifty years ago lots of writers wrote most engagingly, elegantly and memorably without ever having to sink to the level of the drunk in the gutter - when a character in a P.G. Wodehouse novel mentions how his old nurse insists on his wearing his 'warm woollies' (meaning thick underwear), his friend, a male, clears his throat and says 'Keep it clean...we are gentlemen here'. And centuries before Wodehouse, the Church taught that using swear words was a sin against man and God. Where have all the gentlemen gone, and how, for God's sake, is that a sign of progress? Why on earth is the only kind of humour that most people now understand is locker room- and toilet humour?
I have many other kinds of complaints - after all, I have been keeping track for decades - but for now let me touch upon just a few more: the absolutely unnecessary introduction of new 'buzz words', indicating a general amnesia that lots of fine words to express the same fact or feeling or idea already exist, the sickening overuse of a handful of currently catchy words though lots of (often better, more apposite and precise) synonyms exist, and the utterly gross and stupid alteration of the meanings of existing words (meanings which have stayed firm and stable for many generations) just because a lot of tweens and teens find them 'cool', and lots of adults, including teachers and journalists, even in their fifties and sixties, are imitating them in a pathetic attempt to stay 'cool, relevant, in touch' (with ignorant and silly babies!). So 'brain rot' suddenly became the 'word of the year', to mention just one expression that belongs to the first category; great and incredible and amazing and stunning from the second (most people these days cannot write without superlatives to express utterly common, mundane and highly forgettable experiences). But the worst of all belong to the third category. He'll likely eat, they now say; only a generation ago (and even among some literate people today), that would have been 'He is likely to eat', and what happened to probably and presumably or 'in all likelihood'? Now you always need to do something, not must do or should do, or ought to do. These days they 'revert' to you, when they mean 'reply'; to revert has always meant to return to an original position or situation. It's his call, they say: why not 'decision'? And nobody criticizes or upbraids or rebukes or takes to task anybody any more, they only 'call out' people: what do they do, I wonder, when they hear that 'the army has been called out to restore order in the streets'? We don't have chairmen or chairpersons any more, only chairs; I wonder how soon they will start saying 'The milk has delivered the milk'? They write could've and must've, though these coinages are unpronounceable, quite unlike 'I've' and 'they've', but who will drum that into pinhead philistines? I'm good, they say, when nobody asked them to give themselves a character certificate: what was wrong with I'm fine or I'm alright, I'm okay? Most people don't understand the once-crucial difference between house and home (even the banks give you home loans now, not house-building loans). Overturn has been replaced by upend, as if it has acquired a bad odour, and the police question multiple suspects these days, not many or several or a lot of (ask any math teacher what multiple really means). When profits rise, they say 'going north', while plunging or falling or plummeting profits, which is BAD, is being called going south - though I have heard that many Australians resent the connotation.
They reference a book or article today, they don't 'refer to'. They ask you to 'grab' a deal, a coffee, an umbrella, though only a generation or two ago mothers and grandmothers taught that 'grabbing' anything is bad manners unless you are in a dire emergency; it indicates impatience, pushiness and generally poor upbringing. Nouns are being turned into verbs right and left, adjectives into nouns: eat healthy, they say, not eat healthy food, 'live young', and this is our ask (not query or question), keep track of your spends (not expenses), a five minute read, not 'it will take you five minutes to read', let me have a think (depth of idiocy!) instead of let me (just) think! 'Like' is everywhere, so He was running like there would be no tomorrow', not 'as if there would be no tomorrow'. The original use of 'like' was to compare two dissimilar things (it's called a simile, you ignoramuses), as in 'My love is like a red, red rose'. Then there are juvenile (moronic?) abbreviations, like prepping for preparing, vacay for vacation, b'day for birthday, invite for invitation. Recently I asked for a demonstration at a car showroom, and the salesboy didn't know what I was talking about: I had to explain that what I wanted was, in his pidgin, called 'demo'.
Journalists are a special class of vandals. They use 'in' words fundamentally to fit their column centimeters, did you know that? So a court 'bins' a petition, not rejects, the opposition 'flays' or 'slams' the government (how many still know what a ghastly thing 'flaying' was, and that you slam doors, not people?), a debater 'destroys' her opponent when the reporter intends to say that she merely scored a point. They write "I have been asked 'to not say' that I lied", not 'I have been asked not to say...'. they take books off of the table (what is that 'of' doing there?), and 'My mom is visiting with my grandma' (why 'with'?). And they can only write about older people and newer inventions these days: they have forgotten that words like old and new exist, and that 'less' and 'lesser' mean quite different things.
Then there is the weird caricature of the meanings of existing words. So a meeting is called 'brilliant' because nice food was served, a fine piece of engineering becomes 'insane', a gooey cake is called 'decadent', a clever idea is called 'wicked', and beautiful natural scenery is called 'sick'! How am I going to use these words in their proper, original senses and expect to be understood? There was a character in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass which pompously declared 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less'. Written 150 years ago, and no longer amusing. When enough people start talking like that, the most fundamental purpose of language - to make ourselves understood (and perhaps sympathized with) - will be lost. We might as well go back to grunting, squealing, croaking and roaring like our Stone Age ancestors, after tens of thousands of years of trying to become slightly more civilized. Most thanks, I guess, to 'advanced technology', also called social media, where the blind follow the blind and the stupidest lead from the front.
Yes, I know that lots of language 'experts' are comfortable with these changes, because 'languages evolve' (evolution, if you understood it, idiots, is a process that is supposed to be so slow that it would make glaciers look like they are running!) and the vast majority of lay people are too ignorant, lazy, unfocused and indifferent about quality to care. Fine, but in today's world experts are a dime a dozen, and I don't have to identify with the great unwashed masses to prove my democratic credentials; on issues such as these, I am definitely not an egalitarian, and proud to be that way. As my best students have always known, I am neither a rigid puritan nor a dyed in the wool traditionalist, but I am a conservative, certainly, in the best sense of the word: a conservative is one who is knowledgeable enough, and caring enough, to believe that there are things so valuable that they deserve to be conserved, for the good of humankind and all future generations, as much as for my own sanity and self-respect. So I refuse to go along with every passing fad, usages which become all the rage and vanish without a trace within a decade or two. Any reader who is not absolutely illiterate and older than thirty, reflect on what has happened to the word 'awesome' which was considered an absolutely indispensable adjective just twenty years ago! Nobody says 'My son scraping through a school test was awesome' any more, but I can still use the word in the old original sense, 'Reinhold Messner performed the awesome feat of climbing Mount Everest alone and without oxygen'. Think about it.
