Below the Beltway

Goodbye, cruel words: English. It's dead to me.

By Gene Weingarten
Sunday, September 19, 2010
The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become
the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of
international discourse, is dead. It succumbed last month at the age of 1,617
after a long illness. It is survived by an ignominiously diminished form of itself.
The end came quietly on Aug. 21 on the letters page of The Washington Post. A
reader castigated the newspaper for having written that Sasha Obama was the
"youngest" daughter of the president and first lady, rather than their "younger"
daughter. In so doing, however, the letter writer called the first couple the
"Obama's." This, too, was published, constituting an illiterate proofreading of an
illiterate criticism of an illiteracy. Moments later, already severely weakened,
English died of shame.
The language's demise took few by surprise. Signs of its failing health had been
evident for some time on the pages of America's daily newspapers, the flexible
yet linguistically authoritative forums through which the day-to-day state of the
language has traditionally been measured. Beset by the need to cut costs, and
influenced by decreased public attention to grammar, punctuation and syntax in
an era of unedited blogs and abbreviated instant communication, newspaper
publishers have been cutting back on the use of copy editing, sometimes
eliminating it entirely.
In the past year alone, as the language lay imperiled, the ironically clueless
misspelling "pronounciation" has been seen in the Boston Globe, the St. Paul
Pioneer Press, the Deseret Morning News, Washington Jewish Week and the
Contra Costa (Calif.) Times, where it appeared in a correction that apologized for
a previous mispronunciation.

On Aug. 6, the very first word of an article in the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal
was "Alot," which the newspaper employed to estimate the number of WinstonSalemites who would be vacationing that month.
The Lewiston (Maine) Sun-Journal has written of "spading and neutering." The
Miami Herald reported on someone who "eeks out a living" -- alas, not by running
an amusement-park haunted house. The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star
described professional football as a "doggy dog world." The Vallejo (Calif.) TimesHerald and the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune were the two most recent papers, out
of dozens, to report on the treatment of "prostrate cancer."
Observers say, however, that no development contributed more dramatically to
the death of the language than the sudden and startling ubiquity of the vomitous
verbal construction "reach out to" as a synonym for "call on the phone," or
"attempt to contact." A jargony phrase bloated with bogus compassion -- once
the province only of 12-step programs and sensitivity training seminars -- "reach
out to" is now commonplace in newspapers. In the last half-year, the New York
Times alone has used it more than 20 times in a number of contextually
indefensible ways, including to report that the Blagojevich jury had asked the
judge a question.
It was not immediately clear to what degree the English language will be
mourned, or if it will be mourned at all. In the United States, English has become
increasingly irrelevant, particularly among young adults. Once the most popular
major at the nation's leading colleges and universities, it now often trails more
pragmatic disciplines, such as economics, politics, government, and, ironically,
"communications," which increasingly involves learning to write mobile-devicefriendly ads for products like Cheez Doodles.
Many people interviewed for this obituary appeared unmoved by the news,
including Anthony Incognito of Crystal City, a typical man in the street.
"Between you and I," he said, "I could care less."