The Endless Decline of the English Language

Doomsayers have been tracking the decline of the English language for centuries:

And, in few words, I dare say; that of all the Studies of men, nothing may be sooner obtain'd, than this vicious abundance of Phrase, this trick of Metaphors, this volubility of Tongue, which makes so great a noise in the World. But I spend words in vain; for the evil is now so inveterate, that it is hard to know whom to blame, or where to begin to reform.
(Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society, 1667)

It is shameful to see our very colleges filled with students who seldom set down three consecutive sentences that do not reek with solecisms of expression, of syntax, and of style; while not a few, when they leave the college halls, the winners of a university degree, make blunders even of orthography that might well disgrace a swineherd.
(Harry Thurston Peck, "What Is Good English?" 1899)

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way.
(George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language." Horizon, April 1946)

Lost for Words was my first and, I thought, my last book on English. . . . It was a protest against the cavalier approach we have taken to teaching children English over the past few decades and a lament at the way our language is mangled and manipulated by those who should know better.
(John Humphreys, Beyond Words. Hodder & Stoughton, 2006)

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.
(Dick Cavett, "It's Only Language." The New York Times, Feb. 4, 2007)

In The Standard of Usage in English, Thomas Lounsbury notes that there has existed "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 committed to "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."

But as Lounsbury makes clear, 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 everything we read and hear. (See last week's post on "100 More Words and Expressions That Tick You Off.") But it does suggest that the English language is likely to endure.

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

More Readings on Language:

• Walt Whitman on Slang in America
• The Teaching of English Grammar, by Oliver Farrar Emerson
• Literature and the Schoolma'm, by H.L. Mencken