Feb 5, 2018 10:37 PM
https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018...-the-style
EXCERPT: . . . English, unlike French, has no academy to protect its virtue. Market forces have done the job instead. The concentrations of class and power they create now threaten to undo the language. Meanwhile, the real language war goes on.
[...] English is in an age of decline; English is in an age of vigor. No language, not even Latin when it was lingua franca, has attained the full-spectrum dominance of Global English. Meanwhile in the home territories, the quality of written English has declined as its quantity has increased. In expression, the hierarchies of formality are flattened rather than reinforced. Grammar, once a benchmark of basic literacy, is now a luxury. In spelling, the prizes go to texted acronyms. KWIM?
[...] Many of my students cannot write a legible, joined-up hand. Many struggle to assemble a two-clause sentence without fumbling the grammar. They have trouble spelling “i before e except after c.” They know that there are differences between formal and informal communication, but why should they care? The last president of the United States to write his own speeches was Woodrow Wilson. If you are a freshman in 2018, you will never have known a president who could deliver a speech without the aid of a teleprompter. [...]
Written English is at what the euphemists would call an inflection point. The nineteenth-century ideal of a democratic mass culture is a bizarre historical dream. The twentieth-century empire of “Mid-Cult” is gone. The departments of English got the theoretical barbarians for whom they were waiting. Standards of literacy are declining, even though the tests are getting easier. Knowledge of a foreign language, even Spanish, is rare among those without immigrant parents. Young Americans, like Romans among the British tribes, struggle to understand the language of their servants....
MORE: https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018...-the-style
EXCERPT: . . . English, unlike French, has no academy to protect its virtue. Market forces have done the job instead. The concentrations of class and power they create now threaten to undo the language. Meanwhile, the real language war goes on.
[...] English is in an age of decline; English is in an age of vigor. No language, not even Latin when it was lingua franca, has attained the full-spectrum dominance of Global English. Meanwhile in the home territories, the quality of written English has declined as its quantity has increased. In expression, the hierarchies of formality are flattened rather than reinforced. Grammar, once a benchmark of basic literacy, is now a luxury. In spelling, the prizes go to texted acronyms. KWIM?
[...] Many of my students cannot write a legible, joined-up hand. Many struggle to assemble a two-clause sentence without fumbling the grammar. They have trouble spelling “i before e except after c.” They know that there are differences between formal and informal communication, but why should they care? The last president of the United States to write his own speeches was Woodrow Wilson. If you are a freshman in 2018, you will never have known a president who could deliver a speech without the aid of a teleprompter. [...]
Written English is at what the euphemists would call an inflection point. The nineteenth-century ideal of a democratic mass culture is a bizarre historical dream. The twentieth-century empire of “Mid-Cult” is gone. The departments of English got the theoretical barbarians for whom they were waiting. Standards of literacy are declining, even though the tests are getting easier. Knowledge of a foreign language, even Spanish, is rare among those without immigrant parents. Young Americans, like Romans among the British tribes, struggle to understand the language of their servants....
MORE: https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018...-the-style