typeracer

The viral nature of linguistic change has assumed new dimensions with the advent of mass communications. Consider three examples. (1) On 31 August 1997, immediately after Princess Diana died in a car crash while being chased by tabloid photographers, reporters throughout the world that evening proclaimed that she'd been hounded by "paparazzis." Millions of viewers at once were exposed to the new double-plural. (2) In 1995, Mazda introduced America to its new luxury sedan, the Millenia, having trademarked the car name by changing the standard spelling of a word and dropping an -n-. With the ad campaigns that followed, millions of people were exposed to the single-n spelling and to the idea of having a single Millenia. In 2000, Mazda offered a special luxury sedan: the "Mazda Millenia Millennium Edition" - doubtless prompting in consumers everywhere even further linguistic befuddlement. (3) The new popularity of e-banking has made it commonplace for many of us to pay bills online. One bank now sends hundreds of thousands of e-mail acknowledgments every day, each beginning with an individualized salutation: "Dear Bryan A. Garner; A payment has been made..." When an exasperated bank customer wrote to protest the repeatedly misused semicolon after the many salutations he receives daily, a bank representative coolly responded: "The semicolons are embedded in our computer systems, and there's no easy way to change the code. Besides, several of us here at the bank think the semicolons are correct." The customer's punctuational credentials matter not. When it comes to language, people with meager knowledge like to think of themselves as experts. With each of these mass-communication "linguistic events" or "speech acts" - and my three examples could be multiplied a thousandfold - people not surprisingly come to view paparazzis, Millenia, and semicolons after salutations as normal. And their own usage soon reflects that view. On the whole, teachers of English can do only so much to improve the situation - little but help inculcate a lively interest in words, grammar, punctuation, and the like. Even that much has seemed impossible to many. Certainly it's a great challenge to make those subjects lively and engaging. Yet the best teachers do. But academia has promoted some nefarious ideas that have undermined those efforts, and the ideas have made headway among the teaching ranks. That is, some teachers now validate the demotic idea that no native speaker of any language can ever make a "mistake" - that there are no mistakes (just "different" ways of approaching speech acts). Even if they do believe that mistakes are possible in a native speaker's use of language, they may think that it would be discriminatory and politically unacceptable even to mention the errors. Some teachers think that their mission should be to focus on the appreciation of literature - that linguistics matters, especially those relating to usage, are beneath them. Or they may believe in the "new literacy," the idea that perpetuating standard English is a hopeless, thankless task because linguistics change is inevitable. Some teachers don't want to interrupt the "natural" process of linguistic change. Just go with the flow: as long as their students are intelligible to others, they are "literate" and engaging in "appropriate speech acts." It's true, of course, that children learn to write better if they spend lots of time writing, as opposed to diagramming sentences and going through rote drills. Teachers generally now accept that truth. Yet it's almost as if the education system starts but never even tries to finish teaching children how to write. Approaching a finish would mean recognizing that intelligibility is only part of the goal - perhaps the first part, but only a part. Another part is credibility. If students are to profit from their education, they need to acquire knowledge. For as the truism goes, knowledge is power. But power depends on having credibility with others. Students don't need to have their own faddish or unthinking linguistic habits merely validated at school. They need to have their communication skills sharpened and elevated, lest they enter the adult speech-world handicapped by sounding ill-educated. This upgrading involves their acquiring, among other things, word-consciousness, which tends to retard linguistic change rooted in misunderstandings. This brings us back to usage, and to the viral outbreaks that sometimes become epidemics, even pandemics. Descriptive linguistics hardly resist change - of any sort. They certainly don't see degenerative change as a sign of "disease." Rather, they largely embrace change. As Mark Halpern observes, "Linguistics' insatiable appetite for change in language is undoubtably another phenomenon for which there is a mixture of reasons, but among them one is surely fundamental: without change, an important group of linguistics would have little fresh material to study." So if descriptive linguistics welcome dialectal varieties and resist the teaching of a standard language because a standard language makes their linguistic laboratory less interesting, they're like epidemiologists who get excited about the spread of new viruses. But perhaps the disease metaphor isn't as apt as another biological metaphor - evolution. The forces of natural selection are every bit as much at work in living languages as they are in the rest of the natural world. Over time, words and phrases mutate both in form and in meaning, sometimes through useful innovation and sometimes through unconscious drift and pervasive error. Usually the mutations don't survive, but occasionally a change proves meritorious and ends up becoming a part of the standard language. That happens only if it's fit enough to survive - as a part of the natural selection that takes place in every language. Sometimes the source of a mutation can be hard to pinpoint. Take, for example, the word nimrod. That word has always denoted a hunter. It derives from a name in Genesis: Nimrod, a descendant of Ham, was a mighty huntsman and king of Shinar. Most modern dictionaries even capitalize the English word, unlike similar eponymic words such as mentor (= a guide or teacher, from the name of a character in Homer's Odyssey) and solon (= a legislator, from the name of an ancient Athenian lawmaker, statesman, and poet). But few people today capitalize Nimrod, and fewer still use it to mean "great hunter." The word has depreciated in meaning: it's now pejorative, denoting a simpleton, a goofy person, a dummy. Believe it or not, we can blame this change on Bugs Bunny, the cartoon character created in the 1940s. He is so popular that TV Guide in 2002 named him the "greatest cartoon character of all time." Bugs is best known for his catchphrase "What's Up, Doc?" But for one of his chief antagonists, the inept hunter Elmer Fudd, Bugs would chide, "What a moron! [pronounced like maroon] What a nimrod! [pronounced with a pause like two words, nim rod]." So for an entire generation raised on these cartoons, the word took on the sense of ineptitude - and therefore what was originally a good joke got ruined. Ask any American born after 1950 what nimrod means and you're likely to hear the answer "idiot." Ask anyone born before 1950 what it means - especially if the person is culturally literate - and you're likely to hear "hunter." The upshot is that the traditional sense is becoming scarcer with each passing year. This little example illustrates the huge changes that words can and do undergo all the time. Sometimes the changes aren't semantic - changes in meaning - but instead involve word-formation. Take, for example, bridegroom, or groom. In Middle English (ca. 1200-1500), the original term was goom (= man). The extra -r- was added centuries ago by false association with someone who works in a stable to care for horses. America's greatest lexicographer, Noah Webster, fought in vain in the early 19th century to make a man on his wedding day the bridegoom and all his attendants the goomsmen. But the English-speaking people would have none of it - they wanted their extra -r-, and they got it. The harmless mutation survived, and today we're wedded to it. It's one thing to hear about past changes. We already know the outcomes and feel comfortable with them. But it's quite another to consider current word-struggles. Most people feel justified in taking a position on the current standing of a word or phrase. After all, the language belongs to all of us, and we all have a say.