The Golden Age of the English Language

Last week's post on annoying words and phrases (What Expressions Tick You Off?) sparked a surprising number of comments. (And for that let me say, "Thank you for shopping here!") The most touching note came from a reader who admitted to disliking couch potato "only because it was the favorite phrase of the woman who my husband left me for (or 'for whom my husband left')."

Another reader directed me to a year-old New York Times blog entry by talk-show host Dick Cavett. In "It’s Only Language," Cavett takes inventory of some familiar specimens of "language abuse": commonly confused words (lay and lie, literally and figuratively), mispronounced words (“nuke-you-lur” for nuclear, “hayney-us” for heinous), and a few botched quotations.

Cavett's gripping (and griping) thesis also sounds familiar: "In these days of just about enough perils facing our nation, there is plenty of evidence around to conclude that our grip on our glorious language may be loosening."

A Degenerating Language?

Back in 1979, A.M. and Charlene Tibbetts offered a similarly dour observation in What's Happening to American English?:

That common language [of our ancestors] is disappearing. It is slowly being crushed to death under the weight of a verbal conglomerate, a pseudospeech at once pretentious and feeble, that is created daily by millions of blunders and inaccuracies in grammar, syntax, idiom, metaphor, logic, and common sense.

Cavett and the Tibbettses would presumably agree with George Orwell, who opened his 1946 essay on "Politics and the English Language" with the pronouncement, "Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way."

So we're left wondering, just how long has English been in such a bad way? In 1925, Professor C.S. Ward (in his tome What Is English?) was already sounding alarms:

From every college in the country goes up the cry, "Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate." Every high school is in disrepair because its pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments. A reformation everywhere is demanded.

Or, as Scottish poet James Beattie noted, "Our language (I mean the English) is degenerating very fast."

And that was in 1783.

It seems that our language (I, too, mean the English) has been "degenerating" for an awfully long time. If indeed it has been degenerating at all.

Golden Ages

In The Standard of Usage in English: Is English Becoming Corrupt?, Thomas R. Lounsbury confirms that doomsayers have been tracking the language for centuries:

No one who is interested in the subject of language can have failed to be struck with the prevalence of complaints about the corruption which is overtaking our own speech. The subject comes up for consideration constantly. . . . About this state of things, it is to be added, there is nothing new. There seems to have been in every period of the past, as there is now, a distinct apprehension in the minds of very many worthy persons that the English tongue is always in the condition of approaching collapse, and that arduous efforts must be put forth, and put forth persistently, in order to save it from destruction.

Lounsbury supports his claim with evidence from Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson, both of whom were hellbent on "fixing" the language. And who, like countless other "prophets of woe," dreamed of returning to a "golden age . . . when the language was spoken and written with the greatest purity."

As Lounsbury makes clear, except in the imaginations of linguistic idealists, there has never been a golden age.

The experience of the past furnishes a most significant corrective to those who look upon the indifference manifested by the public to their warnings and to the awful examples they furnish as infallible proof of the increasing degeneracy of the speech. . . .

Neither the grammar nor the vocabulary of one age is precisely the grammar or vocabulary of another. The language of a later period may not vary much from the language of an earlier one, but it will vary somewhat. It is not necessarily better or worse; it is simply different.

That doesn't mean we're required to like expressions such as "think outside the box," "keepin' it real," "at the end of the day," "bottom line," "I could care less," "very unique," "pushing the envelope," "added bonus," or even "couch potato." Know what I'm saying? Such expressions may be vexing, but the English language is likely to endure.

After all, Lounsbury's The Standard of Usage in English (excerpts of which are reprinted here) was published in 1908.