Say what?

I quite like the way language develops over the years, generally rather more rapidly these days than was perhaps true in the past – let’s drop this one at the door of the mass media (I have no empirical evidence for this and am seeking none. It just seems to be a reasonable assumption) and move on.

Slang has a habit of popping up, hanging around for a few years, sometimes a few decades and then fading from use (a wizard notion), some of it sticks and moves across from slang to informal or colloquial English and if it still doesn’t go anywhere and stays in common usage, it can then enter the mainstream language, the bourgeoisie and nouveau riche of communication. Of course, once it’s there and has been established for a good, long time, it can still fade back out of use, creeping through the backwoods of dictionaries, haunting occasional Scrabble boards until, now and then, smelling of wee, old newspaper and cats, it crops up rifling through old lexicons looking for alternative meanings to appropriate in an attempt to rehabilitate itself before being consigned to the scrap heap of history.

Now language develops like a living, evolving entity. Occasionally some one deliberately coins a new phrase, word or concept, but usually, words evolve and creep into the language in such a way that we are not aware of them until suddenly everyone is using them as if they had always been there: “viral” indeed.

I find the whole process interesting, even when the results are, like, as annoying as they are, like, seemingly omnipresent or ubiquitous¹. I have grumbled before about the ‘verbing’ of words: the use of ‘party’ or ‘parent’ as a verb, for instance, and even though there are times when it is useful (though ‘prioritise’ and ‘residualise’ will forever be bastard words in Lea World), the creation of entirely new words simply because no-one can be bothered to look up the existing usage annoys me beyond endurance. Even more annoying, is the recognition that only some of these words annoy me.

I am like, inconstant in my lack of appreciation of these changes and like, trends, innit? ².


¹Oddly, though the word ‘like’ has been around for some years as, for want of a better phrase, punctuation in speech, it is only just recently that it has become really annoying. Twice in as many days I have been on the Tube and heard (on both occasions) a professional-looking young woman talking to her friend and trying to replace every third word with ‘like’, to the extent that I wanted to like, throttle her.

²And when did it become semi-mainstream to use ”innit” as a full-stop at the end of a sentence? It has got to the point where John McWhorter in The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language posits that innit will become a mainstream English phrase over the next few decades. (I think it’s decades, maybe he isn’t quite so precise)..

Say what?

I quite like the way language develops over the years, generally rather more rapidly these days than was perhaps true in the past – let’s drop this one at the door of the mass media (I have no empirical evidence for this and am seeking none. It just seems to be a reasonable assumption) and move on.

Slang has a habit of popping up, hanging around for a few years, sometimes a few decades and then fading from use (a wizard notion), some of it sticks and moves across from slang to informal or colloquial English and if it still doesn’t go anywhere and stays in common usage, it can then enter the mainstream language, the bourgeoisie and nouveau riche of communication. Of course, once it’s there and has been established for a good, long time, it can still fade back out of use, creeping through the backwoods of dictionaries, haunting occasional Scrabble boards until, now and then, smelling of wee, old newspaper and cats, it crops up rifling through old lexicons looking for alternative meanings to appropriate in an attempt to rehabilitate itself before being consigned to the scrap heap of history.

Now language develops like a living, evolving entity. Occasionally some one deliberately coins a new phrase, word or concept, but usually, words evolve and creep into the language in such a way that we are not aware of them until suddenly everyone is using them as if they had always been there: “viral” indeed.

I find the whole process interesting, even when the results are, like, as annoying as they are, like, seemingly omnipresent or ubiquitous¹. I have grumbled before about the ‘verbing’ of words: the use of ‘party’ or ‘parent’ as a verb, for instance, and even though there are times when it is useful (though ‘prioritise’ and ‘residualise’ will forever be bastard words in Lea World), the creation of entirely new words simply because no-one can be bothered to look up the existing usage annoys me beyond endurance. Even more annoying, is the recognition that only some of these words annoy me.

I am like, inconstant in my lack of appreciation of these changes and like, trends, innit? ².


¹Oddly, though the word ‘like’ has been around for some years as, for want of a better phrase, punctuation in speech, it is only just recently that it has become really annoying. Twice in as many days I have been on the Tube and heard (on both occasions) a professional-looking young woman talking to her friend and trying to replace every third word with ‘like’, to the extent that I wanted to like, throttle her.

²And when did it become semi-mainstream to use ”innit” as a full-stop at the end of a sentence? It has got to the point where John McWhorter in The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language posits that innit will become a mainstream English phrase over the next few decades. (I think it’s decades, maybe he isn’t quite so precise)..

While I'm at it...

...happy birthday to ysharros.

While I'm at it...

...happy birthday to ysharros.

Come the revolution

What we need is not a bloody cabinet reshuffle from Golden Gordy. We need a good old fashioned Stalinist purge. Said purge to include cabinet members, senior members of the Parliamentary Labour Party and those so-called Cretins Captains of Industry who derailed the economy with their over zealous money-grabbing.

Pah.

Come the revolution

What we need is not a bloody cabinet reshuffle from Golden Gordy. We need a good old fashioned Stalinist purge. Said purge to include cabinet members, senior members of the Parliamentary Labour Party and those so-called Cretins Captains of Industry who derailed the economy with their over zealous money-grabbing.

Pah.