My youngest daughter and my oldest grandson both need their heads screwed on tighter. The pair of them keep leaving their books here. I am starting to think that they are doing it on purpose now, but I did give myself away a bit. They both know that I tend to read some of the stuff they leave and often ask me what I think, actually it is quite nice to be asked my opinion. I don't always understand it, but it is sometimes better than what is on the telly, all 'reality' shows and as for that Simon Cowell, well really, I think there must be a picture of him somewhere under the reference 'God complex'. My daughter is studying English, she is doing her second year of A-levels for language and literature and doing well, I had never thought of her as much of an academic but she is doing OK. Ryan, my grandson, is in his first year for A-levels, quite an arty lad and is also doing literature but is doing film and media studies too, which sounds like bit of an easy option to me.
Kim left her copy of 'The Portrait of Dorian Gray' the other day, it's by Oscar Wilde. Never thought much of him, he was homosexual, oh no that's not right, I have to say 'gay' now, don't get me started on that political correctness rubbish. Anyway I wasn't sure about reading it, Kim says she is using it for her coursework, and I just thought I would read the first few pages. Well it would be easier to read if she hadn't scribbled all over it, annotations she calls them, her father would have been furious. He hated it if anyone so much as turned down the corner of a page. I did like one line she highlighted, in a hideous yellow; 'The portrait would be the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul' I rather liked that, very poetic and it sums up the story quite well, I could hardly put it down, and the ending was quite sad really, but I did enjoy it.
I found out something about the English language I never knew before, it is called prescriptivism. Apparently there are these linguists who want to protect English from changing. Seemed a lot of twaddle to me. It stemmed from Ryan leaving an article written by John Humphrys, yes him on the telly, he hosts Mastermind now, but he is no Magnus Magnusson. Well in this article he said that texting is destroying our language, he reckoned it is 'pillaging our punctuation, savaging our sentences and raping our vocabulary', personally I think that is a bit strong, but I do think it is not doing our language any good. Young Ryan always has his phone in his hand, forever texting or using that Facebook, and I think his English is quite poor, but not because of texting, but because the government has made a mess of our education system. Reading, writing and arithmetic, that is what I was taught, but it's all that literacy and numeracy skills now. Yes they need some history and geography and the sciences are important, plus these days a foreign language is useful too, so why are they teaching them the economics of Outer Mongolia when most youngsters cannot even spell 'necessary'.
Anyway, these prescriptivists reckon that our language is being damaged by all these changes, so I decided to do a bit more reading, another article of Ryan's. There's this one woman, Jean Aitchison, who says that there are metaphors used to describe language changes. One was the 'damp spoon', that made me chuckle, I mean really, putting a damp spoon in a sugar bowl is very sloppy and that is what she said the prescriptivists think too, that sloppiness and laziness create negative changes in the language. The second one was the 'infectious disease' where we pick up bits and pieces from other languages or cultures and it 'infects' our language, and changes it. That's a bit much, just think about those words we use that are part of our language that are clearly not English, we couldn't have 'deja vu', I suppose that might now be a flashback or is it a flashforward? What about restaurants, no more 'al a carte menus'. I saw a bit in one of the books I was reading about this chap, Richard Vestegan, who wrote in 1606 that if we returned all the foreign words in our language English would be; 'left little better than dumb or scarcely able to speak anything that should be sensible' he was right and perhaps John Humphrys should take that into consideration before he is left up the watery landmark without a twig to navigate. (Up the creek without a paddle)
The last metaphor was the 'crumbling castle' which suggested that at sometime in the past English had been perfect. I might not know that much about the history of the language, but I do know my history, we had Romans, Celts, Vikings and then the Normans all invading the country, they made changes to the language, how else would everyone have communicated? This castle idea is such rubbish, and the older grammarians in the 1700's suggested that English grammar should be like that of Latin. How could they have used a dead language, no-one speaks Latin now or even back then, how could we add new words and phrases to it if English was like Latin. New technology has created all these new words, what would we have 'phoneii mobilus' instead of mobile phone? That idea is just daft to me. Ryan says that my opinions don't make me a descriptivist though, which is someone who embraces language changes. I do agree that all this texting does lead to poor spelling, and those acronym thingys, you know that 'lol' don't help much. There is another linguist, David Crystal, who says that you have to know what goes in the word to leave out the letters, he thinks that the kids can spell when necessary and it is just a kind of slang they use with their friends. Well I might be in my seventies, but I do have a mobile phone, I do not miss out letters, or over use punctuation marks, smiley faces indeed, when I send text messages. Though if I think about it I am not sure my friends would understand them anymore than I do. Language change happens everyday, somethings we hear about and some we don't, the arguments can be interesting, but I must admit that occasionally it is all just Greek to me.
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