"How Was Your Day?": Some Thoughts on Language Change.

I've just heard a radio presenter say: "I hope your Sunday afternoon is going great!"

It might be irrational, but this usage has always made me cringe. It's encountered more often in the phrase: "How was your day?".

I can't remember people saying this when I was a kid, back in eighties Ireland. But I might be wrong about this.

It strikes me as objectionally individualist, relativist, and consumerist. It's not my day, after all. It's everybody's day.

But maybe this is a stupid objection. After all, everybody experiences time differently.

And my reaction isn't even consistent, because I like phrases such as "He had a good war", or "She had a chequered seventies".

Being a double-sided contrarian, I'm often irritated by conservatives' attitude to language change. It seems unthinking and indiscriminate. Just because liberals love to say language has always changed...doesn't mean that language hasn't always changed. Obviously, it has.

If you read twentieth-century manuals of English usage such as Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage or Gower's Plain Words (and I recommend them both), you'll realise that there were lots of fairly recent controversies about language usage which are now completely forgotten, even among linguistic conservatives. The fustiest purist doesn't hesitate to use "contact" as a verb, these days.

So...can we agree language change isn't bad in itself?

But then, what sort of changes and innovations in language are bad?

Well, one battle that I'll fight to my dying day is the battle over "disinterested". It doesn't (at least in its traditional use) mean indifferent. It means not having a personal stake in a question-- having no dog in the fight, to use one of my favourite Americans idioms.

"Disinterested" seems like a good word to preserve (in its original meaning) because it means something very specific. It's elegant. To lose it would be to narrow the range of the language.

Similarly, "fulsome" doesn't mean lavish. It means insincere. I think that battle is lost, though.

This principle can be taken too far. My father used to object to the term "decimate" to mean anything but the literal "killing one in ten". That seems too specific to be useful.

Similarly, he didn't like "iconic" being used to mean anything but "pertaining to icons". I can't sympathise with this, either. "Iconic" in the sense it's generally used today seems like a legitimate extension.

Surely new words and expressions should be judged on an individual basis? I quite like some "valley girl" phrases, such as "my bad" (to mean...well, you know exactly what it means, don't pretend you don't). It's vivid and snappy. What's wrong with that? I also like "awesome" as a term of approval. It's Chestertonian, whether or not GKC would have approved of it.

Recently, I've heard people (mostly on YouTube philosophy and theology channels) using the verb "steelman", meaning to set up the strongest possible version of an opponent's argument-- the opposite of attacking a straw man. I like this too.

One thing I don't like is the torrent of acronyms which has afflicted the language, and which I suspect began in WWII, though the computer revolution probably greatly accelerated it. Admittedly, some of the newer acronyms can be funny, such as "FAFO" (fiddle around and find out).

It makes me wonder why some phrases become acronyms and some don't. Why did the personal computer become a PC, while the mobile phone never became an MP (or the cellphone a CP)?

Another example of language change that I dislike, and that I think most people would dislike (if they think about it), is when national or regional usages are replaced by those of another country, or most likely from the globalizing media. I hate hearing Irish people say "cheers" (for thank you), just as I lament the replacement of "help the Halloween party" with "trick or treat!".

I don't know whether this is reflective of an underlying trend of globalization, or whether national/regional terms just come and go. Irish slang words (like "jammers" for "crowded") have come into being in my own lifetime. On the other hand, there was a generation of Irish people who used certain Americanisms (imported from cowboy and hardboiled detective films) which you'd never hear today. I remember, as a kid, hearing a middle-aged man say a kite was "bust" instead of broken-- a usage that had already passed out of common use in Ireland, at that time.

If I had to choose my single least favourite development in modern English, I would definitely choose the ubiquity of the word "sh---" in colloquial usage, and sometimes even in formal usage. (More than twenty years ago, I heard a college lecturer tell his class to "get their sh-- together". Admittedly, he was a "cool" lecturer.) "I have to focus on my own sh--", "That's some heavy sh---", "This is some cool sh---". What does it say about us, that we compare almost everything to excrement all the time? 

I'm afraid I'm sexist enough to be especially bothered when I hear this usage from the lips of a lady. (Women used to hold men to higher standards of politeness and decorum. It was a charming convention that men didn't curse with ladies present. Not that I think anyone should ever curse.)

In his book A Mouthful of Air, Anthony Burgess admitted his own distate for the increasing use of "sh--" as a stand-in for almost almost anything. His theory was that the people who throw the "sh--" word around don't actually think of excrement when they use it; the word has become completely divorced from the thing, for them. But it still put him in mind of excrement every time, and made him gag.

I have the same reaction as Burgess. Every time someone uses the word, it makes me think of the substance. And it reinforces my general belief that society is increasingly going to sh--.