Mind your nonsense

There are fewer sadder sights than pedants playing Canute with the tide of language change. Some of these poor creatures have slid out from the woodwork to complain about the BBC, which is, they claim, failing in its duty to guard the English language. I am not sure it ever had that task, really, although it served as a de facto guardian of the standard when its announcers all spoke "BBC English", another term for the style of pronunciation known to linguists as RP, and to the laity as Oxford English, or public school English, among other things. (It is simply the "posh" English that you would be taught in an elocution lesson.)

Sadly for the whiners, language changes, and for a language such as English, which does not have an Academie to fight against change, and whose arbiters of correctness, such as the OED, are solid descriptivists, what is right is not some ossified code from the 1950s, but whatever people actually say.

They claim that presenters and correspondents on both television and radio routinely misuse words, make grammatical mistakes and use colloquialisms in place of standard English.

Do they though? You cannot "misuse" a word if your usage is in accord with the majority's for the reasons I've given. Particularly, you cannot be said to be wrong if the language has changed and your accuser simply wishes it hadn't. I note that one example they give is "refute". Now, "refute" may well once have meant "disprove", but it now also means "deny strongly". One may deplore that it has shifted meanings, making it a less precise word, but the shift has happened whether you like it or not.

I note too, with some glee, that as usual when a pedant fires a broadside, he or she ends up with egg on the mush:

He blamed the corporation for ruining a number of words, giving the example of the noun, replica. Correctly defined as a 'copy, duplicate or reproduction of a work of art', Bruton-Simmonds complained that it was now used in place of 'imitation', 'likeness' and 'model'.

But "replica" of course does mean all those things. It basically has two meanings. One is a copy that is indistinguishable from the original. The other is a miniature model of the original. Those of us who spent boyhood (or girlhood) hours gluing together replicas of aircraft and ships will be well aware of this meaning (so it's clear that the word has had that meaning at least since I was a lad, and that's, erm, many years).

The idiot who made this mistake wants a whole grammar Stasi for the BBC. Volunteer nitpickers would listen to the radio, or watch the telly, and then whine disconsolately to the grammar tsar. I'm sure broadcast professionals would welcome these interventions, because we all enjoy being treated like schoolkids at work.

Ann Widdecombe, a phenomenon that I don't think I could adequately describe to American readers (indeed no biography could get across just what an atrocious and hilarious person Widdecombe is), rentaquotes that it is important that broadcasters mind their Ps and Qs because their use of language has a tremendous effect on society. However, she didn't say what that effect was. Broadcasters of course reflect society more than they influence it (although I accept that a feedback loop probably does exist, and of course American TV has some influence on usage -- although possibly not as much as some make out).

They need not fear. Language survives everything except its speakers dying. Like everything else, it evolves. And complaining about that is as sensible as complaining about the evolution of animals and plants. What? You think cats, dogs and birds were better in the good old days?

posted by Dr Zen @ 8:08 pm