It's fun to think that, a few hundred years from now, people studying our language will determine it quaint or cumbersome or just plain backward. Our idioms will have lost meaning and power. Some words will have fallen out of favor. Some will no longer exist because there will be no need of them. And in place of those idioms and words will be new ones that will make perfect sense to the speakers of that time.
Linguistics--the study of language and its change--can be quite fascinating. For several years now, I've had an on-again, off-again love of linguistics. Perhaps more accurately, I could describe it as a mild flirtation with discovering how our language has morphed to how we speak now. My early days of discovery were not so fun, though--in college, on the first day of a required Chaucer class, I was dismayed to hear my prof tell us with great glee that, in reading The Canterbury Tales in middle English, we would "struggle all semester with whether to pronounce the e at the end of certain words." The last thing I wanted as a sophomore in college was to worry about the e at the end of certain words.
But recently, I've become more enamored of that sort of thing--examining how spelling has changed (in the 16th century, some of those pesky [yet silent, by then] e's still existed, as in the spelling of leg as "legge"), observing how words' meanings have changed (how "gay" once meant "lighthearted" or how "awful" once meant "full of fear"), and even witnessing how new words have been coined (as frustrating as some of those words might be, such as "impactful" or "ask" as a noun).
A friend of mine recently posted an article about how the AP Stylebook now accepts "over" as a synonym for "more than." That news made me cringe, just a little. After all, "over" is a preposition, as in "when I chucked that Stylebook at him, it flew right over his head." But, truth be told, in the big picture, change is inevitable. It's the inexorable march of our language toward new, toward common speech patterns, toward commonly accepted norms (whether truly embraced by editors or not). And really, it's kind of fascinating to watch language evolve, like a caterpillar morphing to a butterfly. Whether that butterfly becomes graceful and lovely is yet to be seen; meanwhile, it's sure fun to think about.
Linguistics--the study of language and its change--can be quite fascinating. For several years now, I've had an on-again, off-again love of linguistics. Perhaps more accurately, I could describe it as a mild flirtation with discovering how our language has morphed to how we speak now. My early days of discovery were not so fun, though--in college, on the first day of a required Chaucer class, I was dismayed to hear my prof tell us with great glee that, in reading The Canterbury Tales in middle English, we would "struggle all semester with whether to pronounce the e at the end of certain words." The last thing I wanted as a sophomore in college was to worry about the e at the end of certain words.
But recently, I've become more enamored of that sort of thing--examining how spelling has changed (in the 16th century, some of those pesky [yet silent, by then] e's still existed, as in the spelling of leg as "legge"), observing how words' meanings have changed (how "gay" once meant "lighthearted" or how "awful" once meant "full of fear"), and even witnessing how new words have been coined (as frustrating as some of those words might be, such as "impactful" or "ask" as a noun).
A friend of mine recently posted an article about how the AP Stylebook now accepts "over" as a synonym for "more than." That news made me cringe, just a little. After all, "over" is a preposition, as in "when I chucked that Stylebook at him, it flew right over his head." But, truth be told, in the big picture, change is inevitable. It's the inexorable march of our language toward new, toward common speech patterns, toward commonly accepted norms (whether truly embraced by editors or not). And really, it's kind of fascinating to watch language evolve, like a caterpillar morphing to a butterfly. Whether that butterfly becomes graceful and lovely is yet to be seen; meanwhile, it's sure fun to think about.
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