Notes from the Demise of the English Language

On September 19, 2010, Gene Weingarten published an article in The Washington Post titled “Goodbye Cruel Word: English, It’s Dead to Me.” Here are some excerpts.

The end came quietly on Aug. 21 on the letters page of The Washington Post. A reader castigated the newspaper for having written that Sasha Obama was the “youngest” daughter of the president and first lady, rather than their “younger” daughter. In so doing, however, the letter writer called the first couple the “Obama’s.” This, too, was published, constituting an illiterate proofreading of an illiterate criticism of an illiteracy. Moments later, already severely weakened, English died of shame.

The language’s demise took few by surprise. Signs of its failing health had been evident for some time on the pages of America’s daily newspapers, the flexible yet linguistically authoritative forums through which the day-to-day state of the language has traditionally been measured. Beset by the need to cut costs, and influenced by decreased public attention to grammar, punctuation and syntax in an era of unedited blogs and abbreviated instant communication, newspaper publishers have been cutting back on the use of copy editing, sometimes eliminating it entirely. …

Weingarten goes on to quote the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal as using the word “Alot,” instead of the correct “a lot”. His other examples contribute to my ongoing collection of botched idioms. He writes:

The Lewiston (Maine) Sun-Journal has written of “spading and neutering.” The Miami Herald reported on someone who “eeks out a living” — alas, not by running an amusement-park haunted house. The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star described professional football as a “doggy dog world.” The Vallejo (Calif.) Times-Herald and the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune were the two most recent papers, out of dozens, to report on the treatment of “prostrate cancer.”

One point I disagree with Weingarten on is whether English really matters to most people anymore. I think people do care about writing and speaking correctly – they are often simply clueless about what’s right. For this I blame the educational system and its ridiculous rejection of rote learning. Some things need to be learned by rote. Proper grammar, correct use of idioms, on-point punctuation – these are things that just have to be memorized. Doing your own thing does not cut it in using language when the goal of using the language is to reliably convey meaning from the mind of one person to the mind of another.

The article’s closing harks back to the topics of several previous Writamins and blog posts. The author wrote,

Many people interviewed for this obituary appeared unmoved by the news, including Anthony Incognito of Crystal City, a typical man in the street.

“Between you and I,” he said, “I could care less.”

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