Say what?

[caddyman]

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)..

Comments

[caffeine-fairy.livejournal.com]

"Innit" drives me potty. As does "like" and "y'know".

So endeth today's curmudgeoning.

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

I sort of,like agree, innit?

[caffeine-fairy.livejournal.com]

Death is too good for you.

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

Muh hah haaaaa.

Ouch.

[pipsytip.livejournal.com]

I have to confess to being a neologiser.

And what's more I neologised in my dissertation although the word Magicality did sound like it should exist.

As does tardicular.

There is also the use of So as a emphasis on a negative a la Chander in Friends but I'm guilty of using that one. End of.

[sack-boy.livejournal.com]

If you follow tentacular, the surely tardicular would pretain to tardicle. Which then does raise the question of what does tardicle mean?

[binidj.livejournal.com]

It means there's another TARDIS hanging around out there.

[nyarbaggytep.livejournal.com]

I have an unreasonable hatred of the word proactive. It's a nonsense word. There's active, there's reactive. There is no more active than active, it's impossible to act before you act. If you want to act before someone else acts, then you are pre-emptively acting, not being proactive. Graaaaaargh! Baggy smash!

Argh. It's catching!

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

Quite right, too.

Such horrors are so the tangled telephone wires and crooked wall-hangings of language and should be, like, expunged. Innit.

Re: Argh. It's catching!

[nyarbaggytep.livejournal.com]

Word.

[ellefurtle.livejournal.com]

My Dad gets mad when he hears someone say 'negative energy'. There is no such thing! He knows they mean it in a touchy-feely new age way, but it is still ridiculous!

[ellefurtle.livejournal.com]

Everyone in my office says 'yeahno' before everything.
"How was your meeting?"
"Yeahno it was fine."

It is very irritating.

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

I catch myself saying 'yeahno'unfortunately only after the event. It seems to pop out automatically and I have to be careful to stamp on it.

Innit.

[mezzogiornouno.livejournal.com]

Caroline Flint, our new Europe Minister, is a constant irritation to me (myself, personally)with her every-ten-second repetitions of "er, you know" and the even worse "sort of" when being interviewed. Also high in the irksome chart at the moment:

People who actually say "Eff why eye"

"Credit Crunch" and "Mortgage Meltdown"

And bringing up the rear, and not necessarily relevant to this thread, the man who is to sue Tesco for refusing him the right to sign his credit card purchase slip rather than use a PIN number, as he suffers from (I think) tuberous sclerosis, characterised by bening tumours of the brain which interfere with his numeracy skills. "I am virtually dyslexic when it comes to numbers" he says, going on to say "I'm one of an estimated 2 million people who have difficulty with PIN numbers".

[bluesman.livejournal.com]

I had no idea that the insidious "like" disease had spread from California to England. Having to listen to my stepdaughter's side of a telephone conversation, in which she will unthinkingly use the word two or three times in every sentence, is an exercise in restraint.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

I remember friends of mine using 'like' as punctuation 20 years ago; they were mostly from the Wirral / Liverpool but it was _very_ prevalent.

Y'know

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

Yes, I recall it being a bit of a stereotypical "Scousism", but I don't recall that they used it seemingly after every verb in a sentence. It may just be my memory, but I think it may have expanded over the years.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

I find the use of pause-words fascinating, coming at it from an NLP / pedagogic angle.

Some people use 'like', others 'you know', others yet 'umm', or 'you see' etc. etc.

I find it really interesting to see how people's teaching and learning styles match up with the pause-words they use - if I had the money / time, I'd actually start researching it, because I'm pretty sure there's a link.

[keresaspa.livejournal.com]

Like goes back as far as I can remember in Belfast, where it is used by the lower orders and is always pronounced 'leek'. I must confess to using it myself sometimes when I'm not thinking, although how it crossed to Southern California is anybody's guess.