As language evolves, its practitioners adapt

It has been said that a swell thing about language is that it is constantly evolving. Some words and phrases die aborning, while others grow vibrant on their way to maturity until, passing from the scene, they leave behind life histories as intriguing as any human biography. Language usage changes from century to century and, sometimes, seemingly almost from year to year.

“Language gradually varies, and with it fade away the writings of authors who have flourished their allotted time,” Washington Irving advised 19th century readers. Thus, sad to say, you can no longer find many people who can pull off words the likes of “anywhither” for “anywhere” in everyday speech, for example. Or “downhaggard” for “disconsolate.”

Should a person happen to stumble into some backwater where such antiquated speech flourished, I suppose he might come away considering the population to be somewhat doited, which, according to my glossary of forgotten English, means “dazed or crazy, as in old age.”

Doited. What a great word to describe those of us whose memories are no longer the precisely calibrated machinery of yore. We who trot out to the garage to fetch something and, upon our arrival, stand there with only a vacant stare for company as we try in vain to remember what we came for. What a pity that “doited” has long since been confined to the waste bin of linguistic history.

Those whose business it is to study human speech, its structures and perpetual modifications, no doubt could explain why such words become extinct, I suppose, just as they might explain why old words often take on new meanings. Why the word “gay” has been reconfigured to convey something quite different from its glory years when it meant “happily excited,” for instance. Or why “honk,” when said by a true Mainer, has nothing to do with the cry of a goose, but everything to do with rapid acceleration, as in “I’d better honk ‘er for home. Suppah’s waiting.”

As well, a knowledgeable linguist might explain to me just why most reporters in print and broadcast media nowadays seem to never have met the child they couldn’t refer to as a “kid,” a misdemeanor that, back in the day, would have earned a young scholar a ration of admonishment from his teacher.

If I learned anything at all in the classroom at that tender age it was that “kids” are young goats. Playful and frisky little animals, to be sure. But animals, nonetheless, and not to be equated with the human beings that my classmates allegedly were. To make the mistake a second time was to flirt with the shame of becoming the designated dunce and parked in a corner for a spell until the smartening-up process could kick in, vis-a-vis the kid-child thing.

Today, if you read a story concerning children, or hear one read on television or radio – be it the work of local station or national network – nearly every reference to a young person is “kid.” I have in front of me a page from one prominent weekly newsmagazine on which I have highlighted in a sickly fluorescent pea-green the references to “kids.” Sixteen of them in a story roughly 16 inches in length, or one “kid” per inch of copy. You’d think it would have occurred to an editor, if not to the writer, that that could be considered a bit much even by liberal left-wing rag standards.

To say that such usage grates like fingernails dragged across a blackboard is to state the painfully obvious. I should imagine that only to someone with a tin ear would it fail to aggravate every bit as much as a buzz phrase that increasingly tends to accompany the long-standing abominations “ya know” and “I mean” in the vocabulary of the under-40 set, regardless of race, creed or national origin.

The offending phrase to which I refer is the mealymouthed “sort of.” As in, “He sort of got the hint that the honeymoon was over when she sort of ran off with the milkman…”

My diligent research shows the vexation to be most often uttered by people employing phony British accents while being interviewed on the public broadcasting network in this country, or on CBC Radio in Canada. Same difference, in the vernacular of my good ol’ boy acquaintances.

Whatever the source, when I hear the phrase repeatedly spoken over the radio as I am honking ‘er down the highway so as not to be late for suppah, I sort of want to drive my pickup truck into the nearest bridge abutment.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may contact him via e-mail at olddawg@bangor

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