Modern English
15th September 2021
The English language as written today is often nearly incomprehensible on first reading, and as spoken almost unintelligible and unpleasant to the point where the civilized listener disengages himself in frustration and disgust from the speaker and his speech. The problem in the first instance is the readiness of people who know better to embrace demotic usage in semi-formal literary venues, such as respectable journalism; the second, the bizarre combination of pretension and illiteracy and its results, the jargon and barbarisms ubiquitous in the 21st century.
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Most remarkable, however, is the impression one has from watching the evening news shows that nearly everyone on camera is speaking English as a second language. The majority of anchors and their guests seem particularly ignorant of the most ordinary usage and long-familiar colloquialisms and idioms — always and everywhere the sure sign of persons for whom the language is not their native tongue. In recent weeks, I have heard on FOX News programs alone ‘isolated to’ for ‘limited to’; ‘placating to’ for ‘placating’; ‘from every political stripe’ for ‘of every…[etc.]’; ‘you’ll be discriminated’ for ‘you’ll be discriminated against’; ‘to the president’s point of view’ for ‘in the president’s point of view’; and ‘you’ll be trained into’ for ‘you’ll be trained to’. ‘Take a listen’ is a linguistic abomination unheard of outside a television studio; it does not seem to exist in the vernacular. The use of an adjective bereft of its following noun — e.g. ‘a hypothetical’ — goes unquestioned. So does ‘fraught’ minus a specified prepositional object. But what is the editor of a prominent American newspaper thinking when he allows a contributor to write of ‘a Trump return to the White House’? Often writers and editors seem determined to reduce the number of words they use in a sentence to a minimum while breaking every recognized rule to do so, but here the difference is one of a single letter. And how, and why, has ‘to advocate’ been replaced by ‘to advocate for’? — an obvious barbarism if there ever was one. Does the second really sound that much better to the postmodern ear ‘untrained into’ Latin?
Tru dat.