Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [8]
THE NEW NORMALCY
All these stirrings have made it abundantly clear that the language establishment has been losing its clout to prevent or control changes. Young people especially are learning how to shape language to their own tastes and desires. No longer are only a few wandering rappers and poets experimenting with new sounds and symbols. Everyone seems to be playing the game either by innovating or passing on what others invent.
As columnist Smith noted, Palin’s neologisms immediately became part of “the new normalcy.” By that he meant that she is not the one out of step; it’s the parents, teachers, journalists, authors, and assorted nitpickers who still complain about what they see as misplaced apostrophes and butchered syntax.
Unlike traditional language leaders, Palin and Bush don’t ride a high horse; they ride the power of example. Almost anything they—and other selfless pioneers—say reverberates throughout the world at Internet speeds. As a result, many words that used to be criticized—even shunned—are now readily accepted. And they quickly become part of a new pattern that is characterized more by disorder than order.
WHEN IS A WORD APPROVED?
It used to be the job of an important dictionary such as the Oxford English Dictionary to determine when a word is accepted into the English language. But no longer; that job has been claimed by the Global Language Monitor, a website based in Austin, Texas. It claims to have counted every word in the English language and at 10:22 a.m. on June 10, 2009, it declared Web 2.0 as the millionth word.
But who’s really counting, and what are the criteria? In fact, nobody knows how many words there are in the English language because there is no widely approved system of counting them. Nor does anyone know whether Web 2.0 is a word or just a tennis ranking for a guy named Web. Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the World Wide Web, calls Web 2.0 “a piece of jargon.” Actually, it refers to Web applications that facilitate interactivity on social media sites, not a second edition of the Web.
Trying to pin down such an amorphous mass of verbiage goes against the whole point of language today: to let human nature create the best way for people to communicate and understand each other.
In the new normalcy, it rarely makes sense to look up the meaning of a word in a dictionary. The unwritten rule seems to be, if you don’t know the meaning, take a guess, because the word may be too new for permanent enshrinement, despite all the efforts of lexicographers to stay cool and relevant. Besides, who has the time for such details these days?
Much the same thing is happening to grammar and syntax. Even well-educated people are ignoring the old rules and making up their own. Traditional guardians of formal language, such as TV reporters and anchors, are increasingly letting words and phrases meander naturally. And daily newspapers are allowing more grammatical lapses, presumably while editors are out to lunch.
Not many people these days have the time for language details; they are often too busy phoning, texting, e-mailing, Googling, Facebooking, Twittering, YouTubing, surfing TV, or multitasking two or three activities at once.
For most people, especially younger ones, there’s no going back to the picky past, with its stuffy rules and dying language. By accident or intelligent design, all of us are on the front lines of language evolution.
SNUCKERED AND DRUGGED
One increasingly popular word today never had legitimacy in educated circles. In the few cases where it was listed in a dictionary, it was dismissed as colloquial or worse. The word is snuck, now uniformly preferred