Back in the day it was what it was

For more than three decades, Lake Superior State University has been releasing a list of overused, wrongly used and annoyingly used words that came to prominence in the previous 365 days. The tradition began in 1976; these days the group that oversees the list is bombarded with suggestions from guardians of English.

In the past, phrases like "We're pregnant," "Back in the day," "It is what it is" and "blank is the new blank" have been shown the door. Words like "Sweet," "awesome" and "decimate," when they are wrongly used, generally in some new slang, have made the list. "Gitmo" was banned for sounding too much like a Japanese cartoon name and combined celebrity names like Brangelina were labelled as obnoxious by one nominator.

The full Lake Superior State University 2008 List of Banished Words is online for your viewing pleasure. The new list should be posted on New Year's Day.

Who's to blame ?

There's no doubt the proper use of the language has declined over the past 40 years. Standards have been lowered, parents don't take the time (or have the time) to help their children along, and for too long there has been a reluctance to fail students who don't make the grade (I graduated from college with people who still couldn't string a sentence together -- and this was a journalism program).

Barry Turner has the following opinion:

The culprits are many and varied. The rot set in early in the 1960s when schools adopted a libertarian approach to education which involved giving up on difficult subjects including grammar. Led on by politicians dedicated to mediocrity, (or ‘equality’ to use the accepted term) teachers were encouraged to set standards by the lowest common denominator. The impact on English was catastrophic as the best educationalists soon came to recognise. But it is easier to destroy than to build and the return to formal and effective learning still has a long way to go. One has only to listen to the delegates to an NUT conference to know that for many teachers clarity of thought let alone clarity of language is way beyond their capacity. Dimly aware of their failings, the incompetents look to technology to compensate for poor linguistic skills. We are now committed to making our children computer literate; no matter that most are illiterate in every other sense.

The decline of English language teaching in schools had its knock-on effect on academia. A recent survey found that nine out of ten graduates submit applications that are full of spelling and grammatical errors. Are we surprised? Pupils who are unable to express themselves clearly become students who are unable to express themselves clearly. Worse still, some then become university and college lecturers. To judge their standard of communication refer to any book list for higher learning.

You can read the whole article here.

There's no debate

Yes, rock 'n' roll, rap music and other fads or trends embraced by youth have been pronounced at various times over the years as a sign of the end. Those cries were, as it turns out, premature, but count me as one of those who believes text messaging is the beginning of the end for the English language.

There really can be no doubt that text messaging will finish the job started by advertising copy writers. But there's always someone who plays devil's advocate.

Enter TXTNG: THE GR8 DB8.

"Faced with a new kind of communication problem . . . people all over the world have set about solving it . . . not by inventing a new language but by adapting old language to suit the new medium," David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Wales and author of said book, tells the Times of London. His book essentially argues that, much like the hula hoop, we have nothing to fear from digital shorthand.

If I could make a tidy sum out of such a book, I might make a similar argument, too. But I would be wrong.

Time to fight back against the slaughter of English

Some argue the language is constantly changing or, perhaps more correctly, evolving. It was only a few decades ago that we were still taught to write to-night and to-morrow, so one can imagine the consternation of a guardian of English when the hyphen was first dropped and the tonight and tomorrow became common usage.

Generally, the hyphen will eventually be dropped from an oft-used hyphenated word, and many people can accept that. Some argue that if you can see that one day the hyphen is going to be dropped, why use it in the first place (video-tape would be one example), especially in our rapidly changing world.

But things really are different today. With the lack of proper English teaching in elementary schools -- remember phonics? -- kids are being told it's okay to write incorrectly as long as there's enough information there for a reader to decipher the meaning. Text-messaging shortcuts creeping into everyday writing. It's no wonder more and more people are fighting back.

Take the current use of the word "anniversary," for example. How often is it used correctly these days? For the past decade its proper usage has slipped, as young people eager to celebrate a milestone in their relationship, talk about their "one-week anniversary" together rather than saying "we've been together for a week." From that forgivable slip by love-struck teens it has grown into common usage. Not willing to wait for anything anymore, it is common to hear "one-month anniversary" and "six-month anniversary." Heck, so many people (and this is in print or on TV) have forgotten the proper usage that it is now common to hear those who don't understand the word say "one-year anniversary."

Even worse, this morning I hear Evan Solomon on a CBC broadcast say "13th year anniversary" while promoting a segment on the end of the Bosnian War. If we have prominent broadcasters (on what is supposed to be a top-quality network) bastardizing the language, what hope is there of ever correcting the problem?