I watched a program on television last night featuring a woman who pronounced the number four as "fo-were." For me, something like that is the equivalent of having a tire blow out while driving down the highway.
It's
the end of all forward progress. I need to pull over before severe damage is
done.
For
the rest of the program, I kept repeating fo-were every time the woman
appeared. Today, in the fresh light of morning, I don't even recall where I was
headed with the show.
But henceforth,
fo-were shall be the new four.
—Mitchell
Hegman
I recently watched a video on the death of the English language by today’s youth. It is becoming condensed. I posit that might be due to the fact most people, not you or me, use only 500 words in most of their daily conversations. This leads one to change the meaning of some of the words you know to describe something. I found this problem to be prevalent in the most unlikely of places in 1975 in a technical writing class. I used the word redact, to edit, in a class paper and was told it was not a word. My paper went from and ‘A’ to a ‘B’. The professor did not know the word nor did his grader. His demeanor upon learning this was, ‘OK, so what. I’ll just adjust your grade.’ while I was expecting more of a ‘Wow, that’s a new word for me.” since he did teach writing and editing.
ReplyDeleteI am astounded by how poorly younger people write when challenged to do so. If not dying, the English language is certainly suffering! I am also appalled by how pervasive swearing has become.
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