I’ve witnessed many changes in our language during my lifetime; from the letters my grandma wrote right up to the latest technical jargon. I guess that, if you live long enough, you witness enough evolution to be able to notice that things never stay the same forever. Grandma wrote about attending “ice cream sociables” and exchanging “receipts” for cakes and cookies. In my mother’s day, those had changed to “ice cream socials” and “recipes”. To me, the “socials” have morphed into “ parties” or “get-togethers” though I still use “recipes”. I suspect the two will be described in more modern terms (“events” and “formulas” perhaps) within another generation or two.
It hasn’t been such a long time since my spelling lists contained such spellings as “Hallowe’en” with an apostrophe, and “pled” as the past tense of “plead” instead of today’s more commonly used “pleaded” which still sounds awkward and ungrammatical to my ears. I hear that word several times a day during newscasts reporting on crimes and other court cases and I wonder why the newscasters don’t opt for the shorter word, as they seem to be aiming for brevity by talking so fast I can barely keep up with what they are saying.
That rapid speech we hear on television these days seems to be aimed at getting the news over with and saving more time for commercials. To avoid missing something important, I keep the closed captioning feature on my TV turned on most of the time so I might be able to catch something that zoomed past my ears too quickly. I’ve learned to ignore the misspellings and garbled words that show up on that little strip at the bottom of the screen and have often wondered just how helpful that actually is to people who can’t hear and have to depend on the captions. And that leads me to question the usefulness of that new telephone service that turns spoken words into written ones for people who can’t hear well enough to enjoy phone conversation. If the technology is no better than the television version, it can’t be of much help to those who really need it.
I recently became aware that at least one state has decided that school children need to learn to write in cursive and are reinstating the subject in all their schools. I say Hooray! for the brave people who have decreed that a step back is actually a step forward. There’s an entire generation of students who missed out on the Palmer Method and may never be able to decipher the letters their grandparents wrote and who will very likely never produce a legible, proper signature of their own. Educators recognized fairly rapidly that teaching children to read using total word recognition was not working and went back to phonics. Too bad it is taking them so much longer to recognize the value of cursive handwriting. I hope the practice returns to more schools in more states a lot sooner than predicted.
I suppose, in a way, the computer is responsible for the demise of spelling skills as well as being partly responsible for the disappearance of cursive writing. I’ve noticed, over the lifetimes of several computer programs, that there is no longer a variety of cursive fonts available, so even people who might want to pretend they can write “the old-fashioned way” no longer have the option to fake it. And I don’t suppose many people question the notion that the spell-checker is directly responsible, not only for our children not being able to spell but for the increasing misuse of homonyms. The spell-checker doesn’t know – or care – if you mean “right” “write” or “rite” and such errors show up even in published material because too many people depend on the computer to do the proof-reading.
I’ve learned that language changes through usage, through fads, mistakes made by celebrities and public officials and from regional speech patterns, slang and idioms being accepted and absorbed to the point where they are considered standard. Through sloppiness and lack of concern, we lose clarity, specificity and accuracy. Educators and those who depend on language as their means of making a living are the ones who can, and should, keep our language alive and well. I hope they’ll try.
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