The English language is always in decline. People have been complaining about it for five hundred years, ever since the translators of the King James Bible finished creating their masterpiece, and Shakespeare put down his quill and went into retirement. But the decline has speeded up. We seem to be losing our grasp of English in several different ways.
Perhaps the least important thing is the collapse of grammar. There have been too many pedantic, scolding books about grammar and punctuation in the last few years. Frankly, most of these rules are trivial. If I hesitate over "I" and "me" or "him" and "he" I can check the book which says: "Any pronouns that appear in an appositive are assumed to have the same function as the word the appositive refers to." Fine, I can live with that, whatever it means. But who really cares about fine distinctions between less and fewer, that and which, may and might? Who can figure out "Who and whom" in the proper case? Who can get excited about the floating apostrophe? Not I (or me).
My education was grammar free. We had a splendid English teacher, Mr. Thomas. He taught us to appreciate literature, which was no easy task. But he didn't teach grammar at all. He believed that grammar was learned by reading good writers and imitating them, not by following a set of rules. We never parsed a sentence, or discussed the difference between adverbs and adjectives, and we never even suspected the existence of the subjunctive tense, even though it may have been the case that we used it all the time. So I am hardly qualified to police the speech or writing of anyone else, as long as I can clearly understand what they are trying to say.
And there's the rub as Shakespeare himself might have pointed out. It's not grammar but meaning that worries me. Whatever the secret of good writing or speaking, it is certainly not grammatical pedantry. It's all about words. The best writers use simple, direct language, the exact opposite of the foggy, euphemistic stuff designed to avoid hard truths and painful feelings. But old, plain words are losing their meanings faster than we can reinvent them. Many of our best insults and negative expressions like old or crazy have vanished into the fog of political correctness and flabby sentimentality, and words referring to things that make us uncomfortable, like posterity or modesty have simply faded away. It's a process of simplification and impoverishment, the Twitification of the language.
Then there is the plague of wild adjectival inflation. The advertising industry has debased just about every superlative in the language. What words are left once every tacky mass-produced product is described as magnificent, perfect, great, wonderful, a masterpiece, exceptionally unique, or even incredible, for things that are sadly all too credible? Advertising and politics are the enemies of language, because nothing in them can be expressed plainly, least of all the plain truth. But George Orwell had a lot to say on this subject and I can't compete with a writer who was so incredibly unique.
There's nothing to be done about any of this. We can't get back to the language of Shakespeare, or even the stately and supple prose of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But it is worth remembering and regretting the awesome language we once had before we, like, totally lost it.
Copyright: David Bouchier
