A big bag of words

Great post by Geoffrey Pullman on how language isn't a big bag of words, and how English isn't going to hell in a hand basket.

Add a word to a human language, the host and other guests on ToTN seemed to think, and the language is enriched (a caller mentioned hearing a student say "OMG" instead of "oh, my god", and everyone other than me thought that was fascinating; I said it was simply like Colonel Potter on the TV series M*A*S*H calling World War 2 "WW2" except that Potter's abbreviation was over twice as long as the original).  Lose a word, and the language is diminished (and losing two would surely seem like carelessness).  Change a word, however slightly, and the language is not just altered, but positively degraded.

I do not believe a language is a BBoW at all.  To me, it is a structural system, the particular words deployed in the structure being an independent (and much more rapidly varying) matter. But I was swimming against the tide here. Grant and Martha are both in love with lexicography rather than grammar: finding new words, gathering fresh slang, ferreting out rare nouns; and Neal was right in tune with that.  The dictionary is where the action is, they alll agreed.

What happened with a caller from San Francisco called Morgan was instructive, I thought. Morgan found it just intolerably irritating that people were shortening until to till and shortening through to thru (those were the only two examples she gave).

I leaped in, probably breaking several radio rules (sorry to interrupt, Grant; I think you were going to make essentially the same point), and I explained (audio available here so you can check what I actually said): Until is actually an early 15th-century embellishment of till, made by adding on before it (as in "Keep right on till the end of the road"). Eventually the two merged into one word, and the two synonyms lived alongside each other happily ever after. The word till is older, and has always been correct.  It has never been a contraction or shortening. (It is virtually identical to the analogous form in Swedish and various other Germanic languages.)

And through is of course not changed at all by the American practice of shortening its spelling to thru in informal documents. It couldn't possibly lead to any misunderstanding.

Yet, although all were agreed that too many people think English is rapidly going to hell, Grant did end up telling Morgan (by way of praising her for caring about language, I think): "Keep fighting!".  He said, "If you sit back and accept these things without battling for them, then that's the mistake. The mistake is not to say 'This is wrong'."

I demurred.  In a confusing scuffle where four people talked at once, I tried to say no, don't keep fighting, Morgan! There is no battle!  No degradation!  English is going to be OK!