What are your pet peeves re English usage?

The only way a language is destroyed is if people stop using it in favor of some other tongue. It is never destroyed

But what about PC language.

It's all very well Andrew making a grand sounding generalisation like--

The only way a language is destroyed is if people stop using it in favor of some other tongue. It is never destroyed

... but PC language is doing exactly that. The process may be slow enough not to attract the notice of the unobservant but it is going forward.

My Auntie Phyllis didn't sweat. She perspired.

One might easily go on a wild imaginitive joy-ride thinking up future expressions for well known things the names of which are not PC. Some medical dictionaries have obviously been written tongue in cheek.

200 years of PC and a word like bottom might come to be such, evolve dare we say, as to render Shakespeare incomprehensible.

I once read a hilarious two page spread in VIZ, one of our Brit comics, featuring Kylie Minouge's bottom and how it came to be as it was as she kept thrusting it in our faces every chance she got thereby rendering it a matter of public interest. Whether it started with steak and kidney pudding, double chips, double peas, double bread and butter, with gravy, in a chip shop cafe on Blackpool front I can't remember but I can remember where it ended. Absolutely PC it was.

So I wouldn't be too complacent Andy.

They used to call it running the buggers across the river and now it's ethnic cleansing. Or economic relocation.

You say "old words are forgotten," Love. Well, of course. Language is constantly changing. In a very real sense, language is a living thing. Words die, just like people. There is no great tragedy in older words going out of use, being forgotten. Would you rather that we still used words like "forsooth" and "yclept" and "varlet"? Thankfuly, they all went by the wayside sometime during the Elizabethan era when the Queen's English was undergoing some significant changes, just as it is now.

Loveisarose3, this aspect of language that you've been discussing isn't even slang. Doesn't your name point to abuse of the language?

Slang shouldn't be in dictionaries, though it is starting to be. Change is good. But only when it actually IS good and when it benefits the next generation.

Loveisarose3, this aspect of language that you've been discussing isn't even slang. Doesn't your name point to abuse of the language?

Actually, it is Loveislikearose3. And I don't understand how my name "points to abuse of the language"? Please explain.
And yeah, actually, I was discussing a simple version of slang and common (and annoying!) abbreviations.
But it's ok. I don't want to sound like a hypocrite, but even I write gonnas & wannas sometimes too. When texting, for example, to save time. But when abbreviated words are used excessively and it starts to annoy people, I think people should at least sometimes stop being lazy and write their words out. Gosh, I mean, it's not THAT hard.

Students of English, that is, ESLs/EFLs also need to know the meanings for a lot of these words. They buy dictionaries too.

It was tongue in cheek, you not putting spaces between the words in your name.

One person's annoyance is another's no problema.

In the appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell explains the principles of 'Newspeak', 'Doublethink' and 'Ingsoc'. 'The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible'. By inventing new words, eliminating undesirable words and stripping remaining ones of unorthodox and secondary connotations, Newspeak functions 'not so much to express meanings as to destroy them.'

You people are so predictable.
I was just waiting for you to mention those who are learning English.
Haha. I thought about that myself. But I don't like to think that slang will become a permanent part of our language. It changes with age, and I can't wait until specific examples of annoying slang disappear in time and get replaced by something else. Therefore, I don't like the idea of slang recorded in dictionaries. That makes it permanent.

It was tongue in cheek, you not putting spaces between the words in your name.