The Deterioration of Language By Gary Rea
I'm going to be 67 this year (in October, 2019), so my perspective on my native tongue (English, or American English, to be more precise) is a long and detailed one, made more so by the fact I've been a writer for much of my life. Having learned the language from the early 1950s onward, I have escaped the "dumbing down" of the public school system that occurred with increasing speed after 1975. Thus, I have learned the language from teachers, as well as other adults, including my parents and grandparents, all of whom were, on the whole, older and more mature than today's teachers are. One thing I have also learned during my lifetime is that, when learning about any subject that has had a long history (such as the English language), it is best to refer to the earliest available sources, as opposed to more "modern" sources that are often corrupted, incorrect, or incomplete. Why is that, you ask? Well, if you are at all aware of the aforementioned "dumbing down," (written about at length by Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt, John Taylor Gatto, William Kilpatrick and others) you will understand that a significant "revision" of long-existing knowledge has occurred, and a lot of it as a function of the fact that ignorance is as much passed on to successive generations as knowledge is. Think about it: if today's teachers have been the product of this very same dumbed-down school system, then what they are imparting to today's youth is highly suspect, as it is not only bound to be incomplete, but also quite wrong. This applies to every subject across the board, but here I am addressing language learning, in particular. As an example of what is now being officially codified as "correct" English, whether intentionally or not, I'll point to my pet peeve, i.e, the incorrect and needless insertion of the word "like" several times in nearly every utterance people make, these days, without any knowledge or understanding of what the word means and how it is correctly used. The word "like" has only two correct functions in a sentence: one of these is to begin a comparison of people, places or things to other people, places or things. For example, the words, "I was like..." form the beginning of a comparison the speaker is making between himself and someone or something else. Examples of correct usage would be, "I was like a detective in my approach to my genealogical research," or, "I was like a thief in the night, so no one noticed me." Yet, today, I often hear people say, "I was like..." in place of "I said." The difference is not only a matter of correct grammar, sentence structure and clear communication, but one of brevity, as well. When people use this expression, "I was like" in place of "I said," they are using three words where two would have sufficed, and they are using incorrect grammar that implies a completely different meaning, as well. Thus, on a daily basis, I hear people uttering such nonsense as, "I was like, 'well, like, what do you mean?,' and she was like, 'I mean, like, I dunno, maybe like, hey, it's wrong or something,' and I was like...." and on and on, conveying very little in the way of anything intelligible, while wasting the time of anyone who is unfortunate enough to have to listen to this.
Sometimes, people will use "I was like" in place of "I thought to myself," and thus compound the listener's confusion. Did this person mean he actually said it, or did he just think it silently to himself? There is no way of knowing, as the speaker has said neither "I said" nor "I thought." Using "I said" would imply that it was something spoken, whereas, "I thought" makes it clear that whatever it was consisted only of an unvoiced thought. But, this important distinction is lost when someone replaces either "I said" or "I thought" with "I was like." Thus, real communication is thwarted and made quite tedious for people to listen to, as well. In fact, I find this incorrect speech excruciating to hear. People who make this grammatical error are wasting a great deal of everyone's time in just trying to communicate the simplest of thoughts. The second correct usage of the word "like" is to state a preference: "I like pizza, but I don't like it with pineapple or anchovies as toppings," for example, or, "I don't like hearing people misuse language." There is also an increasing prevalence of horrible grammar and pronunciation within the "tech community." For example, the tendency to mispronounce the word "connectivity" with the emphasis upon the first syllable, as in, "CON-ectivity." This seems to have become a standard within tech companies and tech journalism, which is absolutely appalling, coming from people who make their living writing and speaking. None of them would ever think to say, "CONnection" or "CONnect," but when they use the word, "connectivity," they always emphasize the first syllable, incorrectly and needlessly, and it is so widespread among the "tech community" because these are people who parrot each other's language and speech habits in order to fit in with their peers. Another thing I've noticed about the "tech community" is their unfortunate unconscious(?) authoritarian choice of language in talking about tech products and services, i.e., the use of words like "lets" and "allows" in place of more positive terms, such as "enables" or "helps," which would promote a more positive view of their business practices. Do you want to use software that merely "allows" or "lets" you do what you want to do, or would you rather use it because it enables or helps you to do what you want to do? When someone or something either "lets" or "allows" you to do something, the implicit opposite is to not allow you to do so. The whole idea of using software is to expand and enhance our capabilities by enabling us to do what we couldn't do before, isn't it? Another term used widely throughout the tech community is "permissions," which is a term for those things the software or technology will "allow" if you are an "approved user." As one who listens to a lot of "tech" podcasts, on a daily basis, my ears are deluged with a flood of people, ranging in age from their twenties to their forties and older, who are delivering spoken "content" to an audience and are calling themselves "journalists." This "content" often includes such inane nonsense as, "So, like, this is now being marketed as, hey, you can like store files in the cloud...." or the introduction of a training video I was personally called upon to transcribe with the objective of using the transcription as closed captions for the very same training video that would supposedly be understood by software developers: "So, like, Microsoft SharePoint, right?" This habitual use of such "phrases" as, "...so, I was like...." or stating something that someone might say or think as, "...so, like, you could say, hey, I don't wanna do that..." are examples of typical utterances that are strewn throughout people's speech, these days. The appalling thing is that the people are "journalists" and their "speech" is actually being published as spoken "content" for a large audience of people. Every day, I hear this interjection of the word "hey" at the beginning of anything the speaker
is quoting or paraphrasing. For example, "so, I was like, 'hey, I'd like a latte,' and she was like, 'hey, what size?" This would be in place of, "I said, 'I'd like a latte,' and she said, 'What size?" Yet another inclusion of extraneous verbiage occurs when someone uses such words as, "all" or "all up in" in their speech. For example, "I was like, 'I'd like a latte,' and she was all, 'like, what size?" Then there are such phrases as, "I was like, 'I'd like a latte,' and she was like all up in my face with, you know, like, 'what size, bitch?" It is little things like this that further reveal the deterioration of language in our modern society. Another frequently used word, which is more a grammar issue, is "gets," especially when it is repeatedly substituted for "is" and "are." For example, "When you click Save the file gets stored in the cloud," instead of, "...is stored..." or, when a plural is used, "...files are stored..." Again, I hear this all the time in the tech community. Among those errors that have existed since long before there ever was a "tech community" is the use of "that" instead of "who" when referring to people. "That" is applicable only to places and things. People are referred to by "who" or "whom." This is a basic rule of English grammar that everyone should have known by the time they were 10 years old. That said, almost every adult now living makes this error every day. Yet another very common error is the use of "try and" instead of "try to." I still vividly remember more than one English teacher, as well as an English professor in college explaining this one. The word "and" means "in addition to," thus, saying "I'm going to try and...." means, literally, that you're going to try....something as yet undisclosed, and do something else in addition to it. When we mean that we're going to attempt to do something, we try to do it. The old song that begins, "Try to remember that kind of September...." was written at a time when most people knew how to write and speak English. Had the song been written today, the songwriter would have probably written, "Try and remember....," which is incorrect grammar. Then there is the now long forgotten distinction between "further" and "farther" or "in which" and "where." The word "farther" refers to physical distance, as in, "Seattle is farther from New York than it is from Kansas City," yet today, I hear "further" being used in place of "farther" almost always, now. People incorrectly use "where" when they should use "in which," for example, "An End User License Agreement (EULA) is a document where terms of use are stated," is incorrect, while the correct usage would be, "....in which terms of use are stated." The word "where" is properly used to refer to a physical location or place, as in, "Oklahoma City is where I was born." In addition to incorrect grammar is the prevalence of incorrect spellings and pronunciation that seems to abound, these days. This is something I began to notice as a young adult in the seventies and I have witnessed its increase in the nearly fifty years since. In fact, the growing incidence of the decline in language usage has been widely publicized over the last five decades, although awareness of it has declined. Sometimes, these misspellings and mispronunciations are the fault, not so much of educators who have been miseducated, themselves, but rather, are the work of the media. For example, in the 1990s, the Exon-Valdez oil spill at Valdez, Alaska was in the news and it became immediately obvious that the residents of that tiny Alaskan coastal community had been mispronouncing the name of their town, which is a rather common Spanish surname, Valdez. The locals had been pronouncing it as VAL-DEEZ, with a long "e," for some time and, no doubt had insisted, when the international news
media descended upon their locale to cover the oil spill story, that the name was "properly" pronounced as VAL-DEEZ. This became apparent when those same news crews then deferred to the local residents' ignorance of Spanish by then parroting the mispronunciation in every single utterance of the town name and the name of the oil tanker that spilled its cargo there. This not only irritated me greatly, having studied Spanish for six of my school years, but it also had the effect of greatly extending and, thus perpetuating this mispronunciation by people all over the world for years afterward. I'm sure that many people, especially the residents of Alaska, continue to do so to this very day. Not to single out Alaskans, I'll include a couple of other examples from my home state of Oklahoma (I was born in Oklahoma City and spent most of my life there before moving to Seattle in 2009). One of these is the town of Prague, Oklahoma, named for the famous city in what used to be called Czechoslovakia. It was founded, in the late 19th century, by Czech immigrants who, I am sure, were pronouncing the name the same as it is pronounced in their native country, i.e, as "PRAHG." But, over the years since the town's founding, that original pronunciation was lost and replaced by the locals, who have since pronounced it as "PRAYG." Another town in Oklahoma is Wynnewood, which is an English place name and surname that anyone familiar with Steve Wynnewood, the founding member of the rock band Blind Faith would know. It is properly pronounced as "WIN-WOOD," yet, the locals have been pronouncing it as "WINNIE-WOOD" for quite some time. In the case of Valdez, Prague and Wynnewood, the locally accepted pronunciation of each has changed over time due to one factor: ignorance of the original pronunciation and the perpetuation of its mispronunciation into the present. And so it goes, ad infinitum, with each generation losing a little more knowledge of the way things originally were, whether the knowledge is of language, history, science, or whatever. Continuing on the topic of mispronunciations that have somehow become codified as "correct" or "acceptable alternatives" (lexicographers can be blamed for this, as they are supposed to be the guardians of the language, deciding what should be published as correct in our dictionaries and textbooks), there are a wide variety of examples to draw from. One that I find particularly irritating is the assumption made by many Americans (as well as other English speakers) that any word or name ending in an "e" is to be pronounced as though the final "e" is sounded as a long "e" or, in other cases, that the word is pronounced by the rules of Spanish and, thus, the final "e" is sounded as a long "a." For example, I heard this in a podcast I listened to just this morning, in which the speaker continually pronounced the German place name, Hannover-Messe as "Hannover-MESSAY," instead of "Hannover-MESSUH," which is the correct pronunciation. In German, no word with a final "e" is ever pronounced with a long "a" sound as the final syllable. It is, rather, always pronounced as "UH." I learned this from the WWII era German phrase book my father had been issued when he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Anyone familiar with the German language would know this, just as anyone familiar with Spanish would know how to pronounce Valdez. Yet, there are millions of Americans who don't have this knowledge and who have picked up misinformation. The combination of ignorance with misinformation and its reinforcement by repetition and exposure to
others repeating the same errors (such as those made by today's generation of new teachers) is what has created and perpetuated this decline in the knowledge of language. Another widespread mispronunciation is in enunciating the "t" in "often." As in the word "soften," the "t" is silent. It's a Germanic loan word, as is "soften," and the "t" is silent, yet I hear almost everyone mispronouncing it by sounding the silent "t," these days. There are even people who will argue with me about this. Never mind that, in the fifties and sixties, it was taught, by English teachers, that the "t" is silent and everyone knew that enunciation of the "t" is a grammatical error. This is yet another example of knowledge that has been lost on later generations. Of course, just as when these people were know-it-all teenagers, they are now adults in their 40s and 50s who cannot be told anything about the past because they think they know all about it. Never mind that they have been through a dumbed-down school system and were robbed of an education on several subjects, including evolution (thanks to the lawsuits filed against the school systems by "Creationists") or art (thanks to the budget cuts of the 1990s). I suspect that many frequent and widespread mispronunciations are either speech pathologies or habits from early childhood that have never been corrected for. For example, saying "oways," instead of "always," which is properly pronounced as "ALL-ways." My sister, when she was a little girl, used to say "BOW-EENCE" instead of "bounce," but this speech habit disappeared within a few years as her speech improved with education and experience. I also recall my mother telling me that, when I was a little boy, I used to pronounce "garbage" as "gyber," yet this was also gone by the time I was, perhaps, 4 years old. So, how do such obvious mispronunciations as "oways" persist well into adulthood for an alarming number of people, these days? Maybe a speech pathologist could address that question. Habituation without any effort toward correction would be my guess. I still struggle, sometimes, with my tendency to say something that comes out sounding like "the smorning" when I am saying "this morning," and I often need to make a conscious effort to enunciate clearly when I say those words. Other speech deficits I have heard more of in recent years include saying "didn't" while dropping the second "d," so that it comes out sounding like "d'int." In some cases, an error has been picked up and habituated because someone has only seen it in print and never heard it in speech, thus doesn't know its proper pronunciation, as in pronouncing "paradigm" as "PARA-DIJUM." Other errors include "esc-U-lator" instead of "escalator," or "li-BARY," instead of "library." As for the misspellings I referred to earlier, some of these are absolutely appalling examples of ignorance, such as the now-rampant confusion of common words, like "your" (which is singular possessive) with "you're," (a contraction of "you are") or the inability to know the difference between singular and plural, thus using "women" in place of "woman," and vice-versa, interchangeably, or not having learned the basics of punctuation, thus using plural forms, such as "Johns" in place of the singular possessive form, "John's." Such mistakes were rare, decades ago, confined to children who were just beginning to learn the language, yet they are now rampant among adults who went through the school system during the eighties and nineties. Not only are such mistakes made by adults in their forties and even fifties, today, but they are made by writers and journalists, as well as people whose livelihood is dependent upon public speaking. Unfortunately, the generations of English teachers who knew better have either retired or died off by now, leaving a generation of teachers whose English grammar is no better than that of their students.
This is not only the case with the transference of language skills from generation to generation, but all knowledge, in general. There have been dystopian novels written about future societies in which most of humanity's knowledge, particularly of the past, has been lost. Orwell's "1984" is a classic example, as is Ayn Rand's "Anthem." A more recent example would be the movie, "Idiocracy," which, while intended as comedy, is also a cautionary tale of the kind of society that is currently developing. When the passing of knowledge from generation to generation breaks down and there is no one left alive who knows how things once were, humanity is in a state of decline from which there is no turning back.