The Weather Report
It's a popular topic, like the weather, and everyone has their own opinion about it. Language, like the weather, is a dynamic force that constantly shifts. "If you don't like the weather around here, just wait five minutes," goes one of the most common sayings about the weather. People in the Northeast and Midwest, as well as in the West Coast and the South, often quote Mark Twain, Thoreau, or Emerson when they say this, but it's become a piece of proverbial folk wisdom. According to a saying that can be applied to language: "If you dislike how language is used now, just wait five minutes; you'll dislike it much more." This is because those who complain about the way language is used are never pleased for long.
It is through the metaphors we employ to express this negative development in English that we disclose our true feelings about it. We like to conceive of language as a living organism that can thrive if it is properly cared for and weeded, but in the hands of the general public, language, according to the linguistic elite, will become sick and die. Criticism of poor language use is sometimes viewed as a virus that causes physical disease in individuals who are most sensitive to its subtleties. When a language is corrupt, it can be a force for good or evil, anarchic, democratic, or autocratic, depending on its structure. Languages also have an economic life, minting, lending, and borrowing their words like coins and eventually repaying the debts they accrue. The idea that a weather model for language would be revolutionary is a bit surprising, given that we tend to think of language in metaphorical terms and rely on it as a social barometer for gauging things like social status, educational attainment, and general merit.
Using metaphors, language also has a psychological and social life. Sapir Whorf's theory of cogniti e prisen is an extension of this notion, which claims that language serves as the barrier between our minds and the world around us. According to this idea, language does not represent the real world, but rather, it is a transcendental representation of it. Words, in this view, either represent something in an inexplicable but nonetheless certain way, or they don't. In either mouel, the human imagination is constrained by a stricture that prohibits us from knowing what we cannot describe.
However, in reality, language is neither a mirror nor a prison, but rather a prism, a lens that shapes our perceptions but that we can also manipulate and direct. In a more realistic social model, language is a set of rules that are created by individuals and then adopted by the community as a whole. These rules are subject to change in response to the constantly shifting environment, and they have the power to do so. Censure awaits those who break the rules of the English language. We tend to think of them as criminals in need of retribution. People should be jailed, for example, if they use words like "gift" as a transitive verb, according to the language judges. (This practice dates back to the seventeenth century.) They gave it to us as a present. The use of "hopefully" at the beginning of a phrase (Hopefully, this won't happen again) is regarded by authorities as no less than a hanging crin-te because it is a relatively recent construction (dating only from the 1960s).
Our speech has deteriorated since some distant time, if what we hear at cocktail parties and in the popular press is any indication. Things are never as they used to be or as they should be when it comes to language. They say that English is in decline, and that all of our attempts to recreate the "Golden Age" of language use, when people paid attention to and used it appropriately, will go unnoticed. The linguistic forecast for these doomsayers remains gloomy: overcast with a 60% possibility of double negatives.
The connection between language and weather is complete when I discover that we place as much faith in language commentators as we do in weather forecasters. The paradox is that despite this, we can't seem to function well without either. While most of us don't open the newspaper to read William Safire's language column or Ann Landers' guidance on proper grammar, popular books and articles on the state of the language attract dependable, often loyal readers. In the same way that many of us remember our schooling in English grammar with chagrin, if not outright pain, we also have a model of an English teacher whose perfection we never managed to emulate, whose disappointment in our performance did not make language study a dead issue but spurred us on to new heights of correctness.
