Although the English language is only 1500
years old, it has evolved
at an incredible
rate: so much so, that, at first glance, the average person
in America today
would find most Shakespearean literature confusing without
the aid of an
Old-English dictionary or Cliff's Notes. Yet Shakespear lived
just 300 years
ago! Some are seeing this is a sign of the decline of the
English language,
that people are becoming less and less literate. As R.
Walker writes in
his essay "Why English Needs Protecting," "the moral and
economic decline
of Great Britain in the post-war era has been mirrored by
a decline in the
English language and literature." I, however, disagree. It
seems to me that
the point of language is to communicate - to express some
idea or exchange
some form of information with someone else. In this sense,
the English
language seems, not necessarily to be
improving or decaying,
but optimizing -
becoming more efficient.
It has been both said and observed that
the technological evolution
of a society
tends to grow exponentially rather than linearly. The same can
also be said of
the English language. English is evolving on two levels:
culturally and
technologically. And both of these are unavoidable. Perhaps
the more
noticeable of the two today is the technological evolution of
English. When the
current scope of a given language is insufficient to
describe a new
concept, invention, or property, then there becomes a
necessity to
alter, combine, or create words to provide a needed definition.
For example, the
field of Astro-Physics has provided the English language
with such new
terms as pulsar, quasar, quark, black hole, photon, neutrino,
positron etc. Similarly,
our society has recently be inundated with a
myriad of new
terms from the field of Computer Science: motherboard, hard
drive, Internet,
megabyte, CD, IDE, SCSI, TCP/IP, WWW, HTTP, DMA, GUI and
literally
hundreds of others acronyms this particular field is notorious
for. While some
of these terms, such as black hole and hard drive, are just
a combination of
pre-existing words, many of them are new words altogether.
To me it seems
clear that anything that serves to increase the academic
vocabulary of a
society should be welcomed, although not all would agree.
For example, many
have accused this trend of creating an acronym for
everything to be
impersonal and confusing. And, while I agree that there is
really no need to
abbreviate Kentucky Fried Chicken, it does become tiring
to have to
constantly say Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or Transfer
Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) when they are both used so
frequently when
dealing with computers on a network. Not only is it futile
for one to reject
these inevitably new additions to our language, one would
do oneself well
to actually learn them.
The cultural evolution of English is not
as distinguishable, nor
seemingly as
necessary, as the technological evolution of English, yet it
exists
nonetheless. It is on this level that the English language has
primarily been
accused of being in a state of decline, specifically by the
incorporation of
"slang" into mainstream language. But Webster's Dictionary
defines slang as:
1: language peculiar to a particular
group: as a: ARGOT b:
JARGON 2: an informal nonstandard
vocabulary composed
typically of coinages, arbitrarily changed
words, and
extravagant, forced, or facetious figures
of speech.
In this sense,
much of what is commonly thought to be proper English can be
said to be slang.
When the U.S. declared its independence from England, one
of the things
scholars did was change the spelling of certain English words:
colour was
changed to color, theatre to theater, etc. In addition, Americans
have, over time,
given new names for certain things: what we call a trunk
(of a car), the
English call a boot; what we call an apartment, the English
call a flat, etc.
But because they have been in use for so long, they are
no longer
considered to be slang words. R. Walker writes, "if slang and
jargon are fixed
in the language, a process begun by their addition to the
dictionary, it
helps to make them official." It seems then, that a word is
slang only if it
has not yet been accepted, that it is instead a candidate
whose initiation
into the English language is determined by popular opinion
and time.
Slang in America today, while varying from
region to region, has one
major theme in
common - it is short. And while history has shown that most
of it will die -
never making official "word" status - to be replaced by new
slang words, some
of it will stay. The word dis (short for disrespect), for
example, has
become a popular word used by more than
just Generation X.
What's
interesting, however, is that even the nature of current everyday
prose has begun
to shorten: it is more direct and to the point. As an
example of
older-style writing, Stephen Jay Gould, in his essay "Counters
and Cable
Cars," writes:
Consequently, in San Francisco this
morning, I awoke before
sunrise in order to get my breakfast of
Sears's famous eighteen
pancakes (marvel not, they're very small)
before the morning
crush of more amenable hours rendered the
restaurant uninhabitable
on Berra's maxim.
This piece, while
cleverly phrased, has a wordiness to it that would rarely
be found in the
average present-day essay. This is not because writers of
today have
smaller vocabularies than essayist of yesteryear (although they
might), but
rather because there is a much simpler way of saying exactly
what Gould said.
Ever since my very first English class, I have been told
that, as a
writer, it is my job to get the reader's attention, for I have
something I wish
them to read. Furthermore, as a writer, it is also my job
to communicate
clearly to my audience. In this respect, why choose one word
that is fairly
uncommon (amenable) when other less ambiguous words could be
used. This is not
to say that writers should cater to the lowest common
denominator - the
everyday reader should still be held responsible for
developing a
reasonable vocabulary. Nevertheless, when a writer uses more
words than are
necessary to convey accurately his/her message, he/she has
is doing their
message an injustice. Thus, in the writing of today there
can generally be
seen a more direct, seemingly less ambiguous tone and
direction (save
for the uneducated). The days when it was looked upon
favorably to
write in great length and use as many "big" words as were
possible is over.
That style, albeit elegant, does not suffice in this
fast-paced
society. Acronyms, idioms, and slang are constantly in the
making, providing
new, quicker ways for people to convey ideas and exchange
information.
English, in the coming century, will inevitably come to focus
more on the
actual message than the package it is delivered in. It follows
then, that what
be developed in the children of the future, more than
anything else, is
their ability to think; to formulate a thought worthy of
sharing. For, no
matter what shape the English language takes in coming
years, what will
never change is the desire and need our of
society to
communicate.
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