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At the time of writing, I have no idea what “gas lighting” means. Neither “benching”, “mirroring”, “sealioning” or an asset management store? – “gray rock”. I am “performative,” but the world seemed to live without the word, the use of which has become performative until five minutes ago.
None of this even goes into the neologisms of Anthony Burgess’s identity politics. And not in “both parts,” why is it always a verb? – but conservatives barely exceed a sentence or two. What did “signaling virtue” add to “holiness”? Who didn’t prefer the “snowflake” in the hands of a poet like Longfellow?
It’s something that improves the lives that languages mutate. But I wonder if English has ever been as restless as it is now. If the changes were maintained at the level of slang or subculture, they would be of purely academic interest. Instead, what we have is constant leaks in the mainstream.
A vector for this is that growing push known as the corporation, which never saw a social fashion to which it would not yield for a quiet life. Another is the public sector. I look at an “Equality, diversity and inclusion” NHS website, one of the largest entrepreneurs in the world. To the extent that it is literate (beware of “white suppression”), it is a glossary of “alliance,” “lived experience,” and other medical needs.
There used to be two arguments against this kind of mischief. One was aesthetic. The blurring of slang can assail the ear like the white noise of a boiling refrigerator. The other objection, that of George Orwell, is that it is politically insidious. Soviet or Nazi, Jesuit or anticlerical, the perversion of language is the cunning of the despot.
Let me suggest a third more strategic issue. There is only a threat to English as the lingua franca of the world and it is not Mandarin. It is not even the (overrated) potential of translation technologies. It’s the tongue’s own offspring towards shit.
The pace and darkness of lexicographical change could plunge English into what a language of commerce, science, and diplomacy cannot survive: confusion. I know native-speaking native English speakers who don’t manage to keep up. For those who learn it as a second language, the scope of the error is greater.
Imagine you are an intermediate English student who wants fluency. You are trying to master the verb “center.” A few years ago, focusing was doing something calming at a stressful time: cooking was a central hobby. As new as that definition may have been, it has once again become something like “unduly promoting.” If I grant Lyndon Johnson civil rights, I will focus white people on a black story. You can find this use of the word in an alleged logbook.
And none of these meanings, remember, match that of your textbook, where centering is moving an object to the center of a physical space. At some point, this kind of ambiguity ceases to be proof of flexible, textured language. It becomes the mark of an unusable.
In his book on English, Kingsley Amis identified two enemies of the language. The “berks” speak it crudely and idiomatically. In his hands or mouth, the Englishman would die of impurity, as did the late Latin. On the contrary, “wanderers” are inflexibly beautiful. They would cause English to die of purity, like medieval Latin.
What we face now, English-speaking comrades, is a kind of hybrid. Imagine a berk’s disregard for tradition, with an unsmiling zeal of dirty people. (I would mix the epithets, but the result matches a great FT reading profession).
Ugly change, I can live with it. If you “shout” things and “turn people around” again, you sound like a fool, but your meaning is clear enough. There is also no major damage to the fallera profile wedges of the “Be responsible for the energy you provide” variety. The problem begins when a language loses its meaning, not its grace.
This time has come. Before he thought it was a blessing that the Englishman never had his own Académie Française, with some kind of VS Naipaul at his helm. Now I ask. A non-French fluency allowed the language to sweep the world, yes. But so did his clarity.
Send Janan a janan.ganesh@ft.com
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