George Rebane
Our English, as a language to express complex and abstract thoughts, is almost absent from conversations of not only the young, but also people already in their forties. I was reminded of that again during this morning’s sermon when our pastor totally destroyed any notion of properly using personal pronouns – ‘… and then they asked he and I to come …’.
When we got home my email contained a note with a link to an article about the death throes of English as commonly used today. Reading the report (here) with sample quotes was almost as painful as actually listening to someone attempting to speak. Among the points made was the expanding absence of abstract thoughts in today’s communications.
The piece recounted the almost diseased uses of ‘like’ multiple times in a short sentence. Also noted was the common habit, primarily by females, of ending declarative sentences in a questioning inflection, as if the speaker was in doubt about the simplest of things.
To abstract and summarize an experience or idea today is attempted by the most torturous of soliloquies that consist of recounting statement by statement the contributions of the participants. No conclusion is, or perhaps, can be offered. And the unaided listener is left to draw his own conclusion about whether the dialogue had any point whatsoever.
Author Clark Whelton identifies the mid-eighties as the approximate start of this linguistic pandemic, discounting attempts at earlier starts with such afflictions as ‘Valleyspeak’ that was already prevalent in the LA suburbs of the seventies. But that was the decade when the problematic pedagogical produce of the Great Society was firmly ensconced in classrooms across the land. It was also the decade when other components of a young person’s education were deconstructed in the public schools. New math was being poured into young minds, the utility of grammar was abandoned, and history was being revised into a more progressive view of the past. Hopeless change was already in the air as attempt was accepted for achievement.
The end product is now a population that cannot identify the topic of a paragraph, and therefore does not speak in paragraphs – too long and too hard to keep to the same idea, given there was one to begin with. Thoughts are expressed in nibbles, and short sentences pass for a paragraphs. We have come to an age where tweets not only serve, but must needs serve.
Disjoint and inchoate notions are constantly cobbled together into overarching belief systems that feel good but will not support their owners in reasoned conversations. The most logically absurd verbal sequences are passed as positive contributions to conclusions. The language with which to do otherwise is simply no longer there.
In the end we are seeing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – ‘language determines thought’ – being demonstrated on a national scale as we bravely march forward to do battle on the world labor markets. Call your local school district to see if they have a Plan B.
rebanesruminations.com 
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