As regular readers of this space are well aware, your faithful correspondent is not a writer of the most elegant or proper English prose. But he does try to write proper English. By "proper English" he means the Queen's English or standard American English as was spoken and/or written in the English speaking world up until twenty years ago.
This is the English that was regularly in the popular press, in literature and in the electronic media. It was the English as taught by Webster, Fowler, and Strunk and White. It was English meant to be used as a lingua franca among English speakers. It was free of dialect, cant, occupational terms and slang in general.
In those days slang was written with quotation marks to signify that the slang term was rather suspect and dialect was identified as so. There was an assumption that there was a proper way to speak English and an improper way to speak English. Proper English was the language spoken in public or among those outside of one's social or occupational group. In other words, a machinist would refer to one thousandth of an inch a a "thou" among other machinists, while using the term "one thousandth of an inch" among those outside the trade. Or Japanese-Americans would refer to elastic as "gommu" among other Japanese-Americans while using the word "elastic" among the gaijin.
About twenty years ago, the various new media and the entertainment industry decided that they wanted to appeal to youth instead of conveying clear information that would be understood by all English speakers. They began using street slang and business slang. The result, more recently has been the regular use of such terms as "my bad", "gettin' real (or makin' it real)", "hottie" and "taking it to the next level." What do these terms mean? They are so loose in definition as to mean nothing. Does "my bad" mean that one has been bad, done something bad, made a mistake or is "bad" in the street sense? Does "gettin' real" mean being sincere, a genuine item or feeling or getting down to brass tacks? Is Monica Belluci a "hottie?" Was Deborah Kerr? Was Audrey Hepburn? What exactly is a "hottie"? When a young man and young woman have been kissing one another good night for several weeks and one suggests that they take their relationship to the next level does that mean that they should go back to holding hands? Or start going to bed together? One wonders if, in announcing the declaration of war against Japan, if had the current trend toward the use of street language had become popular, Franklin Roosevelt would have announced to the nation, "Yesterday, December seventh, the shit hit the fan in Pearl Harbor."
Here's the gist of the matter. English is a difficult language to master. For some it is a difficult language to attain competency in. But these are not reasons for the various media to lower the standards of the usage of the language to appeal to those who cannot tell a preposition and a noun. One would think that those in the various media would want to try to raise the standard of the use of the language for no other reason than to allow more nuance in their stories and programs. But the hunger for money trumps what is proper and more and more while reading the newspapers and watching television and the movies we will be subjected to such terms as "MILF" or "googling."
It's all enough to gag a maggot.
No comments:
Post a Comment