I have been a working editor for forty-five years, and throughout that time, to gauge from letters to publications and public diatribes, the English language has undergone a calamitous decline. There are no standards, grammar is a smoking ruin, the Young People are barbaric, and Civilization As We Knew It is gone. Just gone. Ask anyone.
Let me suggest, if you are among those shouting, "The End is near!" at the front door, you have misunderstood fashion.
You know, and understand, that the music of the 2020s, like it or not, is unlike the music of the 1920s. You have seen how fashions in clothes have shifted over the years, even though you might regret that it has become commonplace for men to wear light brown shoes with dark blue suits. Baltimore used to have a complement of German restaurants, but our tastes these days prefer Italian. Language is no different.
It has ever been so. Here's a passage from Jack Lynch's The Lexicographer's Dilemma: " 'It is not the business of grammar,' wrote the clergyman and educator George Campbell in 1776, 'as some critics seem preposterously to imagine, to give laws to the fashions which regulate our speech. On the contrary, from its conformity to these, and from that alone, it derives all its authority and value.' " Conformity to common use determines grammar.
David Crystal, writing in The Stories of English to urge respect for all the dialects in our Englishes, uses a wardrobe metaphor: "With clothing, a diverse wardrobe enables us to dress to suit the occasion; and so it is with language."
Even the grumbling purists dimly perceive this. Spelling (yes, it's not grammar, but ...) varies. We used to write "to-day" and "to-morrow," and now we don't. We realise/realize that British and U.S. spellings vary, without impairing our ability to comprehend.
Punctuation, too (also not grammar), changes as it suits us. In the eighteenth century we liked to put a comma between the subject and verb of a sentence: "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof. ..." We don't do that any longer. We don't care for it. Oxford comma partisans bleat that its use is essential, anti-Oxfordians bray that it is useless, and readers consume both species without blinking.
Our very words themselves go in and out of favor. The nineteenth century liked to identify a widow as a "relict," as if she were the residual property of her deceased husband. Try that today. Jonathan Swift's "Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue" deplored the use of the vulgar term "mob," but here in Baltimore we take a perverse pleasure in having been known as "Mobtown."
In the prefatory note to the 1980 anthology The State of the Language, Christopher Ricks writes that the meaning of a word is not a matter of fact or opinion, but "a human agreement, created within society but incapable of having meaning except to and through individuals."
So English, its spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, and even grammar, is what we collectively make it over time, and just as our tastes in music, dress, and food mutate, so does language vary to mean what we are trying to say.
