DEBASING THE CURRENCY OF LANGUAGE

The dumbing down comes not from those people adding nuance to language.

The dumbing down of language is exactly what this thread is.

These new words that people are whining about are done deals.

A word or phrase doesn't have to get into a dictionary for it to be part of language. Dictionaries are not updated daily.

The language is thus deteriorating horribly

.so long as their political aspirations are met

Goes beyond the political into the very nagture of the humanoid personality so convinced of its own logical absolutes

“Literally" to mean “figuratively”

“Hopefully” as a whole-sentence modifier

“Convince” to mean “persuade"

I don't have a problem with "hopefully", really. Hopefully the work will be done by Friday I can live with, or even the work will be done, hopefully, by Friday but not the work will be done hopefully by Friday. You often see in UK offerings that someone sadly died.

The Hohenzollerns originally came from Franconia, Bavaria, Austria

Jesus you're full of ****.

The problem here isn't the use of the word but the unfortunate placement of it.

The placement of the two is identical, M.

Heard at work: "It was so cold this morning I literally froze to death waiting for the bus!" (I'd have been OK with "nearly" or "practically").

I think saying that a joke "kills" the listener is hallowed by its antiquity.

Thanks for the response JTT but some of us conservative in the realm might disagree

Forgive me JTT but aren’t you setting yourself above

Setting myself above: The eventual result of vulgarization will be that all words will have so lost specific meaning any sentence whatever can be interpreted to mean anything at all.

The language is thus deteriorating horribly

But while it is understandable that speakers of a language with a literary tradition would tend to be pessimistic about its course, there is no more hard evidence for a general linguistic degeneration than there is reason to believe that Aaron and Rose are inferior to Ruth and Gehrig.

Most of my fellow linguists, in fact, would say that it is absurd even to talk about a language changing for the better or the worse. When you have the historical picture before you, and can see how Indo-European gradually slipped into Germanic, Germanic into Anglo-Saxon, and Anglo-Saxon into the English of Chaucer, then Shakespeare, and then Henry James, the process of linguistic change seems as ineluctable and impersonal as continental drift. From this Olympian point of view, not even the Norman invasion had much of an effect on the structure of the language, and all the tirades of all the grammarians since the Renaissance sound like the prattlings of landscape gardeners who hope by frantic efforts to keep Alaska from bumping into Asia.

http://www.pbs.org/speak/speech/correct/decline/

If you only have one of something, how can it be an icon?

An announcer would be talking about someone's first album, describing it as "iconic." Excuse me? If you only have one of something, how can it be an icon?

How can it be the representative sample of someone's art, it it's the only sample out there?

Gee, C, all one has to do is check a dictionary to find out that this is a perfectly natural collocation.

These silly prescriptions are perpetuated by folks like you who simply aren't willing to do a modicum of research.

Only a nut could simultaneously fulminate against "silly prescriptions" and haul out the OED as an authority.