Quote:Setanta:
No, JTT, you miss the point . . . few young native-English speakers even know any longer that gay means anything else--those who do would be embarrassed to use the term in any other way.
You really are a piece of work, Set. You rant up and down the various threads, bloviating on history this and that, chastizing those who would speak erroneously on things historical yet here, on a thread about language, you're more than willing to let any old thing fly.
You mouth many of the old canards and you're willing to let most anything go because you possess a wellspring of ignorance on what language actually is, and it just refuses to be corked.
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The Decline of Grammar
Geoffrey Nunberg
... 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.
It is absurd even to talk about a language changing for the better or the worse
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.
The long run will surely prove the linguists right: English will survive whatever "abuses" its current critics complain of. And by that I mean not just that people will go on using English and its descendants in their daily commerce but that they will continue to make art with it as well.
Yet it is hard to take comfort in the scholars' sanguine detachment. We all know what Keynes said about the long run, and in the meantime does it really matter not at all how we choose to speak and write? It may be that my children will use gift and impact as verbs without the slightest compunction (just as I use contact, wondering that anyone ever bothered to object to it).
But I can't overcome the feeling that it is wrong for me to use them in that way and that people of my generation who say "We decided to gift them with a desk set" are in some sense guilty of a moral lapse, whether because they are ignorant or because they are weak. In the face of that conviction, it really doesn't matter to me whether to gift will eventually prevail, carried on the historical tide. Our glory, Silone said, lies in not having to submit to history.
Quote:Setanta: The same thing can be seen to be happening to the word faith in the United States. No matter how few and "nutty" the abusers of the word may be, they condition the debate by their use of the word--and Clary has a point that this may well lead to other definitions of faith being obscured to the point of obsolesence. That is what happened with the word gay, and it may well happen with the word faith.
I know you think simple repetition will lead to you being accepted as the authority here on the English language. Although that may well happen despite the paucity of evidence for such an assumption, that is no basis for your contention here. You are wrong, but are unwilling to acknowledge as much.
You think that you can substitute a profound absence of knowledge with a bullying manner. It may work with some but it doesn't fly with me, Set.
As I mentioned and you missed, or simply avoided, as you are wont to do, it doesn't matter a tinker's damn to language what we lose and what we don't. It matters not at all that some children will grow up with fewer meanings for 'gay' in their mental vocabulary. Nothing is missing, they and their language have all the words necessary to function.
In fact, young people have invented a new usage for 'gay'.
There are thousands upon thousands of meanings that have been lost, meanings that you have no knowledge of. Does that leave you at a loss for words. Hell no! you can be as bombastic as the next person, usually much more so.
As McTag so eloquently said, and you, in your efforts to bring fairness and balance to the discussion, sailed right over;
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McTag:
"... change will continue. I daresay the pace of that change is nowadays faster, with the pace of modern life and the frenzy of the meeja to find new ways of saying things."
One more small point. It is patently ludicrous to suggest that any one group or any one person can't use the language their dialect gives them in a manner that they see fit.
This silly idea is to deny to language, again out of ignorance, the only method available to change meaning, to add nuances where none before existed.
You don't sound all that sure of yourself with your "may wells".
Clary had a point that I acknowledged; people will whine and kvetch and people have a right to whine and kvetch but that doesn't mean that they are conveying something accurate about language.
When you look at the big picture, it's kinda like complaining about the erosion of mountains, as if the comments have any real significance or even more fatuously, to believe that the comments will put a stop to the erosion.
