Let us not give in to the delusion of the middle-aged that the world is going to the dogs. They have been spreading the delusion since records were kept, from ancient Nestor looking back wistfully to the golden heroes who were slain in front of Troy, adding, as a pathetic postscript to the list, his own dear son., to
Harold Macmillan reminiscing about the golden
douceur de la vie before the First World War came and ruined everything; from Hesiod, moaning that he was born in this brutal Iron Age, in which men work and suffer continually, to Ronald Reagan looking back through rose-coloured shades at an imaginary America, where men were men, and respected the flag, and grandma and grandpa would sit safely on the stoop in their rocking-chairs without being mugged. [...]
Quite recently the Cassandras and associated worriers have found something new to worry about. They suggest that it is not just the world, and civilization as we know it, that are going to the dogs; but specifically that the English language is falling to bits.
This is not an original worry. It comes in waves. Swift reckoned that English was going to the dogs. So did Dr Johnson, who startred his dictionary to the rot in the English language, "which, while it was employed in the cultivation of every species of literature, has itself been githerto neglected, suffered to spread, under the direction of chance, into wild exhuberence, risgned to the tyranny of time and fashion, and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation.It is curious and perhaps significant, that previous periods of revolution in English do not seem to have felt such gloom apprehensions. When the inflexions of Old English started to wither after the Norman Conquest, when the regional dialects of Middle English started to coalesce, when the new world produced the exhuberant fireworks display of new language exemplified by Shakespeare, not a whisper of gloom about the state of the language is recorded for us. Perhaps the Cassandras who felt their language was going to the dogs could not write; and the clerks who could write recognized that language was made for men, not man for language.
[...]
Our perception of the English language and how it works has changed radically in the present generation. In the High Victorian world the pristine philologists saw the language in much the same way as they saw Victorian society: as a pyramid. At the top was the Queen's English (not, as it happens, spoken very well by Her Majesty, who retained a faint German accent all her life; she wrote it with naive charm and enthusiasm). The Queen's English was the sort spoken in an Oxford accent by the educated classes in the south-east of England, taught by the great public schools and the old universities, and printed in
The Times and the books from the main London publishing houses. Lower down the pyramid were lesser kinds of English, some of them perfectly respectable members of the House of Lords of language, such as the dialects and grammars of Scottish and American English; others of them disreputable commoners, unspeakable by the civilized, such as
Cockney or
Gorbals.
