Then it was newspapers, now it's Twitter

From The American Language, on how newspaper writing and design has shaped language use:

'The headline,' said the late E. P. Mitchell, for many years editor of the New York Sun, 'is more influential than a hundred chairs of rhetoric in the shaping of future English speech. There is no livelier perception than in the newspaper offices of the incalculable havoc being wreaked upon the language by the absurd circumstance that only so many millimeters of type can go into so many millimeters' width of column. Try it yourself and you will understand why the fraudulent use of so many compact but misused verbs, nouns and adjectives is being imposed on the coming generation. In its worst aspect, headline English is the yellow peril of the language.' 'This,' says G. K. Chesterton, 'is one of the evils produced by that passion for compression and compact information which possesses so many ingenious minds in America. Everybody can see how an entirely new system of grammar, syntax, and even language has been invented to fit the brevity of headlines. Such brevity, so far from being the soul of wit, is even the death of meaning; and certainly the death of logic.'

Fun game: substitute "Twitter" for "headline" -- you can see how their arguments would extend into our millennium. What will be the next technology to drag our language through the gutter?!

Americanisms new and old

I'm turning, again, to H.L. Mencken's The American Language; it's so dense and packed with information that I find it hard to progress more than a few pages without starting to track down some of the source material to learn more (today's diversion: an 1841 edition of the Congressional Globe on Google Books, which offers "A glance at some of the characteristic coinages of the time").

My copy, a fourth edition reprinted in 1937 that I found at Argosy Books, was perhaps the best-spent $11 I've doled out in the past year. It's a great reminder that so-called corruptions of English, American or otherwise, have been fretted over for decades; for example, Mencken notes:

A great rage for extending the vocabulary by the use of suffixes seized upon the corn-fed etymologists, and they produced a formidable new vocabulary, in -ize, -ate, -ify, -acy, -ous and -ment. Such inventions as to concertize, to questionize, retiracy, savagerous, coatee (a sort of diminutive for coat) and citified appeared in the popular vocabulary and even got into more or less respectable usage.

Suddenly, systematize doesn't seem quite so egregious. But don't worry -- the BBC is still cataloging our linguistic sins; here's 50 irksome turns of phrase that grate across the pond. Maybe they can just make a list of things we are allowed to say?