It’s commonly heard these days that English is going to hell in a handbasket, but it’s worth remembering that we’ve always said things like this. A hundred years ago, as telephones became more and more common, sticklers railed against the popular shortening of telephone to simply phone. The moral here is that language is always changing, and in hindsight, not necessarily for the worst. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Ever-Changing Language”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Sometimes people like to complain that English is going to hell in a handbasket, that it’s getting corrupted, that it’s being destroyed.
But you know, the truth is that there’s been this kind of linguistic hand-wringing going on for centuries.
The other day I found a complaint like that from the 14th century. This was a Benedictine monk who wrote that by mixing and mingling first with Danes and afterwards with Normans, in many cases the country’s language is impaired, and some use strange stammering, chattering, snarling, and grating gnashing of teeth.
Oh, it sounds terrible.
It sounds terrible.
Poor English. What’s happening to English?
Poor English. All that, you know, Norman French coming in.
Of course, country and language, which were used in that… are from Norman French.
There you go.
So that’s outstanding.
And of course, there’s the famous Cicero quote, right? This is pretty much in every linguistics 101 test where we’re from the year 258.
Yeah.
He’s calling for a purge of language to get away from the common usage and get rid of the distortions.
I’m just summarizing here.
But this is how long ago was that?
That’s a long time ago.
And more modern stuff.
I’ve got one for you.
You’ll love this.
A hundred years ago, when the telephone started to become more common, people railed against the word phone as a shortening of telephone.
Oh, yeah.
This guy here, this is Hammond Lamont in the book called English Composition from 1907. Purely typical of the kind of screeds people wrote at the time.
Nothing extraordinary about this man at all.
He’s just one of many.
He writes, still other barbarisms are those words which, though really not in the English language, are used by the ignorant and vulgar.
Some of the more common vulgarisms are, and these are on his list, phone, photo, pants, co-ed, exam, gym, bike.
Terrible, right?
These are all utterly standard now.
And talk about being on the wrong side of history.
So it sounds like the moral of the story, Grant, is language changes, but human nature does not.
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