Neologisms and quaint structures are constantly being swept onto the shores of Queen’s English like so much flotsam and jetsam. This phenomenon, however, ill serves as a mandate for what American thinker Oliver Wendell Holmes called ‘verbicide’; and what the character of Professor Henry Higgins in that vintage Hollywood musical of yesteryear, ‘My Fair Lady’, called “the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue!”
Take, for instance, what I call “the American invasion of the English language”. It must have begun about the time of the ‘Boston Tea Party’ when hordes of patriotic Americans boarded a ship at Boston harbour and threw out chests of perfectly good tea into the sea as a mark of protest. Then Americans decided to throw out perfectly good old English words as well and re-invent the language according to their whims and fancies.
Consider this curious exchange: “How are you?” “I am good.” This is absurd. Whatever happened to “I am well, thank you”? No one can be that good, surely. Not content with making adjectives do duty for adverbs, suffix of ‘ly’ must be taken off adverbs as well. And so we have: “I am taking you serious.”
One of my pet peeves is the American obfuscation regarding gender. For instance, a ‘cool’ guy— or dame, broad, chick or babe— might say “you guys” while addressing a group of men and women or even women only. Then there is the political correctness that I fail to see when they speak about an actor; and, of course, drop the courtesy of a prefix as is done universally today. When they say, “Smith is a good actor”, they might be speaking of a male or a female ‘actor’. Is this, like, you know, dumb or what?
By now, we are all-too-familiar with, “This is different than that one” instead of “different from that one”. And one must never say: “Are we are thinking about the same thing?” Instead, one must be careful to say: “Are we are on the same page?” This is ‘corporatespeak’. Of course, the counter culture of the 1960s in the US offered us the dubious counsel to “tune in and drop out”.
American spelling, which dominates the computer-driven world, is a ‘dropout’ as well. Way back when, someone was not very literate could not spell certain words. Consequently, he must have spelt words phonetically. Thus we have ‘defense’ instead of ‘defence’. However, Americans seem to have left ‘fence’ well enough alone.
Where the British spell it as ‘skilful’, Americans make it ‘skillful’. And where the British write ‘travelled’, Americans give us ‘traveled’. Again, did someone make a mistake, and did the mistake itself become the norm? As for Americans roughing up English grammar, the less said the better. Hollywood scriptwriters are actually making actors say: “What do you got?” instead of “What do you have?” or “What have you got?” Is it all just one big, wild (tea) party where “anything goes”?
Not in my book, I’m afraid. I insist that the word ‘gay’ means blithe, jolly, light–hearted and carefree. Oliver Wendell Holmes would have agreed, I daresay. Could there indeed be anything gay about AIDS, for instance? The truism that a living language changes, is no argument for a needless froth of neologisms; nor for the gratuitous violence wrought upon a word in altering its usual meaning arbitrarily. Creative use of language is of a different order altogether.
Language is integrally and ontologically related to logic, accuracy, truth and similar ideational concerns. It follows, therefore, that progressive erosion of standard forms of linguistic communication and practice would serve as an index of the degradation of all norms and standards in a given society. Maintain the starch and shape in language, and you sustain an entire society.
