20190617.0430

I have posted to this webspace on five previous years of 17 June: 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018. The first of them, the 2013 piece that looks at Dave Neal's 17 June 2013 Inquirer piece "Tweet Hits the Oxford English Dictionary," seems particularly relevant at the moment. Neal's piece reports on the introduction of Tweet and several other words to the OED and the unusually early inclusion of Tweet. My response proceeds, if I recall correctly, from comments made by some people I knew in Stillwater, though it could be a response to others of more literary bent just as easily. And it is not a stance on which I have much softened in six years and across my overall departure from academe, if I have softened at all.
Language changes. New words come into being. Old words are repurposed. Some uses fall away. It is a natural thing as much as the succession of generations, and it is of no more or less moral import than that same succession. And while it is the case that people complain about "kids these days and their newfangled" whatever, it is also the case that people complain about the lingering of the old and their ossified expectations of how things should be. There are problems to both complaints, just as there are problems in the protestations that language should not change, that there was some point at which it was "right," and that all users since have somehow screwed things up.
There are several things I found and still find particularly irksome in such discussions. In many cases, the people making the comments are those whose own usage does not conform to the standards they imagine as in force when the language was "right," and while it is a fallacy to disregard the pot's words about the kettle's color, annoyance knows no logic--and to have people who demonstrate or confess that they do not know make pronouncements as if they do know provokes annoyance in abundance. And it is unfortunately common.
In some cases, some of the people I know who know that language changes, who indeed study the ways in which languages change, make such complaints, that language is being somehow degraded. Yet they do not conduct their business in the older languages that they claim are "better," or even in older forms of modern languages. They do not affect the patterns of decades past, or of centuries. Again, pot-and-kettle annoyance arises, compounded by knowing that they know better--and believing that they ought to act on that knowledge. Somebody damned well needs to.