English is a Dead Language

I remember marveling (in horror) at the page-long sentences I was encountering while reading James Fenimore Cooper in junior high school. While we were able to understand what was written, that was the extreme, at least in terms the literature to which we were exposed. When writing our own essays and theme papers, the rules were “no short sentences” and “no ‘to be’ verbs.” In short, you needed just a little Cooper in your blood to successfully write to the satisfaction of the typical English teacher.

That probably sounds like the Dark Ages to some. While it is accepted that all languages change over time, the past 40 years, and more accurately, the last 10 years, have seen great changes in informal English, if not also in formal English.

When I grew up, “often” was never pronounced with a “t” unless you had a speech impediment and had to go to speech therapy. That’s nothing. We began to break more of the rules, at least in speaking. Ending sentences with prepositions. (Who can forget the Canadian Mounted Police in “Canadian Bacon” arguing among themselves about proper English.) Now I read them in scholarly journals, but at least not often (with a silent “t”). (Now, 12 years after the original issue of this post, I note that the rule concerning prepositions at the end of sentences is actually not a rule, though it is a preference in formal and scholarly writing.)

I see two things as contributors to this rapid demise; 1) the lack of emphasis on composition in schools, and 2) the popularization of first email, and then instant messenger, or IM, for communication.

I will be the first to admit that the “no short sentences” rule for term papers and essays was a bit much, but unlike the experience of the 60s and 70s, my children didn’t have significant papers to write. My oldest wrote a grand total of one paper that was longer than 6 pages by the time he was out of high school. They wrote many one-page or so papers, usually in class, where grammar and spelling were nominally graded since the important thing was getting the idea across. Try writing a memorandum for a client that is full of spelling and grammar errors and they may never figure out whether or not your words are meaningful. They will be too busy concluding you are incompetent due to the errors.

Then comes IM, and to a lesser extent, email. While in a business context you can’t be too sloppy with email, in other situations it is simply a long-winded version of IM. And IM is not much more than hieroglyphics on a wall. It takes a degree in IM-speak (or "IMish") to understand the huge list of acronyms and other shorthands. This is aggravated by the tendency to write everything in lower case and omit all punctuation. To break thoughts, you either leave a little more space, or press enter which sends that thought, then start on the next one.

An IM conversation can be quite interesting, especially for me. I’m only haltingly conversant in the language. I compose and edit my thoughts in English as my son (away at college) is hitting me with a barrage of thoughts, one after another, in IMish. By the time I have read through them and composed another reply, the topic has changed three times. If you try to save the “thread” you will find that it is often disjointed because a reply may be to an entry four items back. This is true even for those proficient in IMish.

I’ve even used IM to explain international tax rules to a colleague who was out of town. (Had to turn off emoticons because code references start turning into smiley faces.) But the damage on everyone’s writing is remarkable. My memo drafts used to be pretty good. Now they are much worse. But I know I will go over them a whip them into shape. I’m beginning to notice IM sloppiness creeping into professional memos. The grammar may be correct, and they don’t write “btw” but general sentence structure is suffering.

English is said to be the most difficult language, at least of the European branches of language. It relies more on rules of structure than on the specifics of words to convey much of the meaning. Suddenly the structure is deteriorating at an alarming rate. In some ways, it is easier to follow the short snippets than a Cooper sentence. But many of the changes are not just about how much we put between periods, but more about how we put the words together. By skipping part of the grammar, we leave part of the meaning to context or guesswork. There’s a lot more to read between the lines. People complain about the difficulties of translating ancient Greek, Sanskrit, or Egyptian hieroglyphics. But your immediate response is seldom as strongly impacted as your inability to translate that computer manual or the last IM transmission received.