Why Should We Lament Changes in Our Language?

Tom Chivers, the assistant comment editor for the Telegraph Online, offered a post titled “A lament for the death of the English language” on August 10^th, 2012.  A tongue-in-cheek interpretation of an ongoing controversy regarding slang and the substandard language that changes every generation, it has often been a delight to pedants over the centuries. I invited Patrick O’Connor, who knows about things British, to respond.  Here’s what he said:

Why couldn’t Shakespeare’s King Lear have simply referred to clothes as being badly torn instead of all that stuff about “loop’d and window’d raggedness”?  Sometimes even the best of English speakers will have to go beyond mere “hyperbole for the sake of effect.”

What may be regarded as sheer bad English by many may be the only way to deliver the last blow and finish the matter in hand.  “Well, I just ain’t, and that’s it.” Now, that would most likely get through when all else had failed.

What about the most celebrated split infinitive of all time, “to boldly go.” There is no better way to convey the feeling in that statement than that.  The nonsense about the split infinitive arose in the thirteenth century and has been a plague ever since.

When George Formby sang, “I was standing on the corner of the street…,” was he being stood-up?  How easy it is to slide from stood-up to stood.

I think I was understanding when I saw the problem with I was stood, but I believe that, in my explanation, I was understood.

I suppose that gotten in American English is a consequence of ill-gotten gains, and not through ill-got gains.

The meaning of sex has now become so explicit, and the way it is constantly used by the media, that gender on a form does remove the temptation to write, “Yes, please.”

It can be posited that, once a good command of the English language is established, to bend it and extend it is to considerably enhance the power of expression.

Shakespeare did it all the time.  Lesser folks will do so likewise in order to amplify the sound of a message.

Why, putting sex on a form instead of gender, I can tell you I am just plain ag’in’ it.  What in tarnation is wrong with that?

If we are going to stick to the rules at all times, there will be no change and hence no progress.  There has to be tolerance for error.  However, once an error becomes fossilized, it may come to be viewed as acceptable, or it can be ultimately discarded.

It may well be that a new way of expressing some situation or mood may be because the old doesn’t exactly fit what the speaker feels:  he doesn’t want “to go boldly;” he wants “to boldly go.”  The former doesn’t convey the forceful emotion nearly as strongly as the latter.

If I wanted to show someone that I was put out by my place in a seating arrangement, I would say, “I was sat in the corner.”  The listener would pick up my negative emotion, I hope, whereas I was sitting is blander.

It appears that, whenever a rule is transgressed, the speaker is attempting to express a stronger emotion that the strict interpretation of the rules would allow—either consciously or unconsciously.

One gets the feeling that the stickler for the rules is rather like the Puritan who was against bear-baiting, not because of any suffering caused to the bear, but because of the pleasure it gave to the spectators.

Are the sticklers really so concerned about the damage done to the language, or rather more about the way that what they prefer to perceive as ignorance, has just succeeded in conveying the underlying emotion, albeit in an “incorrect” form? You have to be able to play with language and traverse beyond the boundaries of the norm.  Sometimes the language isn’t big enough to contain the range of human ideas and emotions.

“I ain’t gonna add no more. Nuff said.”