A Deterioration of Language—Madness Is On the Rise

I’ve been part of various online groups over the years because of my interest in language. For many years I’ve been rebuffed, insulted, and verbally attacked for mentioning how quickly our English language is changing in the direction of not only smaller vocabulary, but a blurring of words.

Surprisingly, groups consisting of language and linguistics professors along with English teachers at all levels almost universally answer any challenge with “language has to change” which of course is not an answer to the question of whether the change serves the speakers and users well or adds confusion and misunderstanding. In fact, such groups have been, in my case the most hostile and rude ones compared to other groups dealing with controversial subjects like gender politics and religion.

Last week I noted to my wife that the cable news talking head had used the word “pivot” five times in less than 30 seconds and in every case used it inappropriately as a synonym for change. Pivot is the new obsession of Journalists and business – did you notice? Not long ago I watched a History Channel show set at the beginning of Prohibition in the US. One brewer said to another “We have to pivot.” That’s an anachronism that illustrates how language changes and how oblivious and defensive we were about it.

My Dictionary says: “See Fulcrum” and that’s just what it means. Fulcrum, in the same dictionary, means: ‘The point of support or pivot of a lever. Yes, there are specialized uses in other disciplines like medicine or biology, but in no case is Pivot a synonym for change or any of the 40 synonyms my thesaurus gives for it. Yet on the TV, on Shark Tank, every adjustment, revision, shift, permutation, etc is a pivot, always a pivot, and nothing but a pivot. Perhaps I’m the only one annoyed at what is effectively the replacement of 40 words and more from the common vocabulary, but the process of substituting a crude and inept metaphor for a host of words makes English less precise and confusing.

I suspect I’m not the only one. I just read an article about software developers engaged in artificial intelligence base systems of artificial speech – things that get better at passing a Turing test in the pursuit of sales and political disinformation. It seems that those things get better, not only as technology improves, but as vocabularies shrink and blur. Certainly, you can’t tell me that logic still prevails when using our Orwellian Newspeak (Excuse me, as we pivot to it) because madness is on the rise and the popular journalistic idiom is another rug under which we sweep the contradictions and absurdities we’re given daily. No, in fact, I’m not and journalists themselves often write articles mocking the cliche and jargon-ridden language of the hip and “educated” so keep the insults to yourself. The language will always change but as it is with biological mutations, these linguistic sports usually fail and sometimes cause people of the future to look back at you, not as hip, but dated. 23 Skidoo!

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