Ugh.

jaggedfragments in response to this post of mine:

Time for another opinion… and a correction.

If you want to get a sense of how confusing the evolution of language gets, ask a non-native speaker what he/she has discovered by trying to communicate in that language. It takes awhile to get the nuances of conjugation as well as what’s really being intended. Example: The one always cited in the books is the word “fast”, which originally meant solidly stationary (hold fast to your dreams), but became the standard word for moving rapidly. The meanings are totally contradictory — technically you could say “hold fast to that pig because the sucker moves fast.” Fasten your seatbelts since discussions like this change fast. “Quick”, the other example often seen, originally meant alive (the quick and the dead) and too has become synonymous with moving rapidly. Compared to the dead, yes, the quick do move more quickly.

Death of the language, as people speak of it now, is about the shortcuts. The influence of text messaging, online messaging, and other condensed forms of communication are constantly being called language killers, as is the shift from handwritten communication in letters to brief emails. Slang, ebonics, and other modern dialectics that wind up creeping into the mainstream mode of speech (spread through popular music and television programs) also are cited. The other day I saw a car with a bumpersticker that said “You cannot b both pro-choice and Christian” — political arguments and logical fallacies aside, I couldn’t get over the fact that this contained “b” rather than “be” since there was space for one more letter on that line, it wasn’t a typesetting limitation.

Language is only as dead, dying, or lazy as we allow it to be. So what if someone says “where you at?” (or texts it as “wher u @”), there’s nothing stopping you from replying in a complete sentence. Or for that matter, replying “where your verb at?”

* The barbarians were so named because they were bearded. “barb” is the Latin word for hair, and the barbarians were not cleanshaven like the Romans, thus any sort of uncultured or brutal behavior ascribed to that group (whether they were guilty of that or not) was “barbaric”. Which has its own set of ironies since the bald-faced Romans were rather, well, barbaric with their bear-baiting and throwing people to the lions for entertainment at the coliseums since they didn’t have bullfighting and rodeo like other nations.

It is true that non-native speakers can have trouble with the contradictory meanings of words and irregular morphological paradigms and the non-literal meaning of idioms (imagine being an English learner hearing “Where are you headed?” for the first time), but how is this fact relevant to the original matter at hand, namely the claim that semantic change is bad and ruins language for all speakers? Second-language learners, regardless of language, will be confronted by unfamiliar novelties, structures and ambiguities—irregularities are an unavoidable aspect of natural, evolving languages. (The language that doesn’t change is in fact a dead language; it has no native speakers).

But this is besides the point: We are talking about words in English changing and gaining/losing meanings over time. The claim is that this ruins the language by making it confusing and less useful and that this is very bad and ought to be avoided. I see no compelling argument for to support this stance. Sure, gay used to mean ‘happy’ and that meaning has lost its currency, but we not confused by the newer and more modern meaning of the word and the loss of the “happy” meaning has not rendered some thoughts inexpressible—there are still plenty of ways to convey the meaning ‘happy’.

But I’d like to address the causes of language death you mention:

  • “The influence of text messaging, online messaging, and other condensed forms of communication”: This pertains largely to written language which is not “real” spoken language, which is what the original poster claims is at stake. Yes, txtspeak has created novel forms of orthography suitable for the medium, but that’s just the writing system. People are just trimming redundant information and inventing shorthands so they can save themselves the labor and time costs. Would we expect text-messaging users to shoot messages back and forth and in newspaper-fit English? That’s silly. The telegram was a precursor to modern txting, but modern spoken English is not telegraphic.
  • “Slang, ebonics, and other modern dialectics that wind up creeping into the mainstream mode of speech (spread through popular music and television programs) also are cited.”: This viewpoint assumes that “dialects” are inferior forms of language, which they are not. Everyone has a dialect, and dialects differ. Some of these differences can be lexical or grammatical, but the grammatical variations are rule-governed and principled, like all spoken languages. Targeting “Ebonics” is equally ignorant, since it’s an empirical fact that African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is grammatical different from non-AAVE Englishes. No dialect or language is grammatically inferior to another—judgments about certain dialects being inferior come from how people perceive other people and use language differences to construct group identities and boundaries. 
    • More on “dialects”: Dialects have been around forever, so the claim that dialects kill language is ludicrous. Dialects do diverge into different languages because of language evolution.

To address your call-to-arms, “[l]anguage is only as dead, dying, or lazy as we allow it to be”, I’ll quote Samuel Johnson (again):

When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation. With this hope, however, academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and to repulse intruders; but their vigilance and activity have hitherto been vain; sounds are too volatile and subtle for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength.

Same shit, different century.