Dangerous times!
Do you think the English language is in terminal decay?
Are you irritated by teenagers who mangle their grammar and pronunciation? Worried by text-speak that breaks all conventions of spelling and structure? Irritated by regional accents on the radio? Puzzled by dialects you can’t quite understand?
You may find all these things perfectly acceptable – in which case you may still want to read on. But if you have trouble with them, you’re not alone.
Much the same complaints have been made by writers all the way back through recorded history. In fact almost as far back as Alfred the Great, who was largely responsible for creating the first written English that we know about.
The truth is that language is a living, evolving thing. So like all living, evolving things it’s going to change. Ironically it’s probably changing more slowly now than it would have done in Alfred’s time, because mass communication (TV, radio and the internet) acts as a stabilising influence. (Yes, honestly, it does!)
How do we know?
We know mainly through the efforts of lexicologists – the people who create dictionaries – and some very scholarly historians of the English language. Thanks to them, it’s possible to tell stories like this one…
Dangerous liaisons
Take the word ‘danger’. In modern English it has a very specific meaning – ‘peril’ or ‘risk’. It came into the English language (like so many other words) with the Normans – but the Old French word daunger meant something quite different. If you were ‘in a person’s danger’ you were under their authority, in the feudal sense of the word – as a liege (if you were noble) or perhaps a serf (if you weren’t).
So it’s not hard to see where the modern meaning came from.
After all, if your liege lord was a complete head case he could have you clapped in irons and thrown in a dungeon. Obviously several Norman lords must have fitted the bill – not long after the Conquest we get shades of the modern sense creeping into everyday speech.
But the old meaning persisted. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales the poet talks (rather disparagingly) about the Monk, saying:
In daunger had he at his owne guise
The younge girles of the diocese
The word clearly has both meanings here (these days the Monk would definitely not pass his police check) but there’s another interesting word as well. ‘Girles’ in Chaucer’s day were young people of either sex – it was only much later that the term became exclusively female.
And new words? Well, they’ve always caused problems. Shakespeare was a notorious coiner of words which his critical contemporaries dismissed as ‘inkhorn terms’ . Many were adopted from Latin, and included (to pick a few at random) agile, critical, emulate, emphasis, demonstrate, dire, extract, horrid, meditate, modest, prodigious and vast - all of which we’d probably use without a second thought today. Just bear that in mind the next time you wince at the latest teenage fad word…!
So when you’re writing copy, remember that language is a living entity. It changes – sometimes slowly, sometimes with startling speed – and your writing may need to reflect those changes. That doesn’t excuse dull, sloppy writing – which has always been out of fashion – but it does mean we should be open and sensitive to new meanings and new words.
And willing to use them if they pack the right punch in the right place – however ‘dangerous’ they might seem…
