I’m well accustomed to being a party pooper. No book signing, speaking event, or Countdown studio day goes by without my hearing either a quiet quibble or loud lament about the state of our language. My inbox is similarly full of grievances, from the invasion of American English and ruination of grammar by social media to specific horrors such as “I should of said” or “I was sat”. The overwhelming sense is that English is plummeting to its inevitable destruction, and that none of us are doing anything about it. Which means that the job of a lexicographer sometimes feels like being a traffic warden: never the bringer of good news. Except that instead of issuing penalties for language violation, we apparently let everyone do what they fancy and stand by as the house of letters falls down.
Those who are mightily unhappy at the state of our language have had some impressive voices in their camp. In 1712, the author of Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift appealed to the Earl of Oxford for some form of linguistic law before it was too late. “My Lord; I do here in the Name of all the Learned and Polite Persons of the Nation, complain ….. that our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions; and the Pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities; and, that in many Instances, it offends against every Part of Grammar.”
It’s not hard to understand why people still feel this way. Language change inspires regular foofaraws, whether it be the addition of the very non-literal sense of “literally” in the dictionary (cue people literally fuming) to the apparent invasion of Parliament by Americanisms, which according to some has gotten a whole lot worse.
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Read MoreAdd that to the insistence of Gen Z on flipping the existing meanings of words that have been with us for centuries, and you can see why some hearts are sinking. 2024 saw a whole new side to the word “brat”, while the expression “very demure, very mindful” sashayed from satire to style mantra within a matter of days.
Of course, slang is expressly designed to go over the heads of everyone else. That is its very intention, just as it was with criminal slang in the Middle Ages. But that doesn’t stop today’s older generations decrying such newfangledness at the expense of “proper” English.
Their disappointment only deepens when they hear dictionary-makers explain that their role is to describe language rather than prescribe it. Samuel Johnson, maker of one of the most important dictionaries in history, might have got away with rude pronouncements on anything foreign (including the Scots), but today’s documenters cannot.
Despite that, and in the absence of linguistic government, dictionaries remain in the eyes of most the only referees: if it is not in the lexicon then a word doesn’t properly exist.
Lexicographers will of course patiently set out our stall: that there never has been a golden age of English; that Shakespeare and Keats were equally derided for their verbal concoctions; and that new technology is routinely condemned for its improverishment of language. When challenged on the importance of rules, we will respond with “what rules?”. The only one in English that all of us regularly trot out is “I before e except after c”, yet as Stephen Fry in an episode of QI pointed out years ago, for every one word that conforms to the rule, there are 21 that don’t.
As for the infestation of Americanisms in Parliament, the majority of those objected to were “ours” long before they travelled across the Atlantic. “Gotten” can be found in a 16th-century translation of the Bible.
On top of all this, our vocabulary has never been reassuringly stable. Many of our words have undergone extraordinary changes of meaning: “silly” once meant “blissful”, “nice” meant “foolish”, and “travel” began with an instrument of torture.
And yet the resistance to change is all too familiar to lexicographers these days. In the eyes of many, we are liberal, let-it-all-hang-out proponents of any addition to our mother tongue, no matter how daft. But we also know that change is essential if the language we chart is to survive. Popular opinion sways us not by its outrage, but by the fact that it is ultimately the only authority that counts. English has always been an entirely democratic enterprise.
So you won’t be seeing any penalty notices for grammatical infringements any time soon, but nor will you be watching chaos unfold. Language can be a brat sometimes – wild, unapologetic, and resolutely self-serving – but we party poopers wouldn’t have it any other way.
Susie Dent is a lexicographer and etymologist. She has appeared in Dictionary Corner on Countdown since 1992
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