In "Pygmalion" (and later, "My Fair Lady") Professor Henry Higgins, linguist and speech therapist, says, of the English language, "In America, they haven't spoken it in years."
He should be around now.
Among the injuries and insults suffered by the language is the pronunciation of "route" to rhyme with "snout" and of "basil" to rhyme with "nasal."
There are also those--especially on the mother network--who believe "Canada" is pronounced "Kenuhduh," and others who drop their Ts, giving us, for example "twenieth" and "sennor stage."
Perhaps most annoying--to our large but sensitive ears--is the habit of emphasizing the first syllable in many words, leading to "ree-sources" and "ree-search," "dee-fence" and "inn-creasing." Perversely, words that do require emphasis on the first syllable have it moved to the second, so instead of "ex-quisite" we get "eck-skwiz-it." Terry Garner felt this began with Wynton Marsalis complaining that jazz musicians at Juilliard got no "ree-spect."
Meanwhile, the phrase "going to" has completely disappeared, and will be replaced in all future dictionaries by "gonna."
In full curmudgeon mode, we could go on to newspaper writers and editors who do not know the difference between "lay" and "lie," or between "comprise" and "compose." But that may be enough crankiness for now. We do not want to lose your ree-gard.
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Amen to each excoriation, although it's doubtful that any amount of correction will slow, never mind halt or reverse, the Philistine stampede. One additional bit of crankiness does deserve to be highlighted - or lowlighted. "Media" is the Latin plural of a Latin noun whose singular is "medium." But even such purportedly literate figures as B. Obama have taken to speaking and writing as if there existed some single entity known as a "media." Equally egregious is the widespread mispluralization of the Greek noun "criterion." e.g. "By every criteria...
ReplyDeleteIt's clear that our language is morphing into mutually unintelligible strata (singular: "stratum") akin to the bizarre condition of Japanese, now so morphologically multilayered that when the Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's capitulation at the end of the Second World War, few understood what he was saying. ("What's that? I dunno. Something about a barbecue in Nagasaki ...")