{"id":22494,"date":"2011-05-05T20:37:11","date_gmt":"2011-05-06T00:37:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miserybay.usanethosting.com\/wordpress\/?p=22494"},"modified":"2011-05-05T20:37:11","modified_gmt":"2011-05-06T00:37:11","slug":"now-35","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/now-35\/","title":{"rendered":"Now and Then"},"content":{"rendered":"

Living Language and Barry’s column
\nby Jean Martin
\nA couple of days ago I stumbled upon a book that will change my life \u2014 and to some extent Barry Bauer\u2019s life as well.
\nI picked up a fairly new book, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue<\/em> by John McWhorter. I have read several books about language, so I thought this might be fun.
\nThis started off nicely.
\nThe author spent the first chapter or so discussing, among other things, the meaningless do<\/em> in our language. Apparently English is the only language on earth that employs do as we \u2014 well, do<\/em>.
\nAccording to McWhorter most scholars have spent a lifetime assuming that once the Angles, Saxons and Jutes landed on the island inhabited by the Celts, the Celts immediately died and\/or stopped speaking anything but Old English. The assumption was that the Celts were not just subjugated by about 200 ruffians with spears; they simply turned up their toes and died.
\nWhat is more likely is that the enslaved Celts who weren\u2019t immediately slaughtered slowly began to try to wrap their Celtic tongues around Old English. And within a couple of generations, as the conquerors intermarried with them, Old English began to change a bit too.
\nOh, did I mention that there used to be one other language that employed the meaningless do<\/em>? It was, of course, Celtic.
\nSo what does this have to do with my epiphany \u2014 or Barry\u2019s column for that matter?
\nWell, as we have just seen, language changes. Just because Middle English (Chauser) suddenly appeared to give way to Elizabethan English (Shakespeare) doesn\u2019t mean that there was suddenly some quantum leap in the way people spoke. It just means that the few people who wrote things down finally gave up and started writing them down more the way people were speaking at that moment.
\nAnd this is where Barry and I come in.
\nWhen we were in school, English had rules, lots of rules. Aside from some very strict rules about punctuation that I carried away from Albina Oille\u2019s Sophomore English \u2014 which I intend to stay with until death do us part \u2014 we learned a few rules that really don\u2019t make a lot of sense any more.
\nOne was espoused most heartily by Bob LaBrie. As he used to put it, “Never end a sentence a preposition with.”
\nNow come on, who among doesn\u2019t do that \u2014 often? “Where did he run off to?” [“To where did he run off?” I don\u2019t think so.]
\nThen there is that old bugaboo, the split infinitive. Among our linguistic cousins on the European continent there are no other people who have to worry about this at all. In English we have to walk<\/em><\/strong>.
\nIn Spanish it is andar<\/em><\/strong>. In German we havespazieren<\/em><\/strong>. Go ahead and split those; I dare you.
\nSo today in English we might have two competing sentences.
\n“I really need to lighten up a bit.” That\u2019s fine proper English.
\nBut let’s try this one. “I need to really lighten up a bit.” Not only does it roll off the tongue easily, it actually changes the meaning just a little bit for the better.
\nAnd now we come to a change in the language that I will happily adopt immediately.
\nIt has to do with the agreement between pronouns. Who among us hasn\u2019t stumbled awkwardly over something like, “Above all a person should try to make himself or herself understood.” Instead let\u2019s just throw in the towel and say, “A person should try to make themself understood.”
\nThis language, it is a-changing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Living Language and Barry’s column<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-now-and-then"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}