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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Monday, May 01, 2006
I have to admit to being more than a little annoyed at this Guardian report on changing patterns of language usage:"59% of all written examples of the phrase in the Corpus call it a "font of knowledge or wisdom" when it should be "fount". It has become so widely used that the wrong version is now included in Oxford dictionaries alongside the right one. "We have to accept spelling is not fixed and can change over the years," said Catherine Soanes, of Oxford Dictionaries. "You only have to look back 100 years, when the word rhyme was spelled rime. But since then we adopted rhyme as the correct spelling because this is more like the Greek word from which it originally came."
She added: "Our Corpus has around 150m words from the web and the way words are written often has to do with familiarity. For instance, 35% of people say 'a shoe-in' when actually it should be 'a shoo-in'. But the original is an American phrase using a US version of the word "shoe" in the first place." According to the Corpus, another linguistic trend is the American habit of turning two words into one, such as someday, anymore and underway. "
It seems to me that in so far as many of the spellings being cited have displaced previous spellings they have become the de facto correct spelling. Changes to language have always been viewed as being part of a continual process of degredation and deformation rather than an aspect of the evolution of a living system that is part of a changing society. As Jean Aitchison put it in her Reith Lectures:"A 14th-century monk complained that the English practised strange "wlaffyng, chytering, harryng, and garryng grisbittyng" (strange stammering, chattering, snarling and grating tooth-gnashing). And the complaints continued. "Tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration," wrote the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, in the preface to his famous Dictionary of the English Language published in 1755. Eighteenth-century worries are perhaps understandable. Around 1700, the seemingly fixed grammar of Latin aroused great admiration, at a time when English was in a fairly fluid state. Many people hoped to lay down similar firm precepts for English, and assumed that somebody, somewhere, knew what "correct" English was. Jonathan Swift wrote a famous letter to the Lord Treasurer in 1712 urging the formation of an academy to regulate language usage."
Since Swift and Johnson sought to fix language so as to perserve it (in much the same way raspberries are conserved by being turned into jam), advocates of such views have always had to contend with the fact that languages do not remain static; many of the words Swift denounced as abuses are now established parts of the language that grammatical conservatives would fight to the death to preserve. In this case in particular, the sense of 'straight-laced' / 'strait-laced' or 'free rein' / 'free reign' seems so clearly equivalent that it's rather difficult to see why the changes should be seen as impairing the original meaning.Labels: Language
posted by Richard 2:05 pm
