Grammar gripes: why do we love to complain about language?

People sure get mad about words. Every month for a few years now I’ve been a “grammar enthusiast” guest on ABC Radio Melbourne. We do talkback and people call in with their grammar-related comments. Sometimes they ask questions. Last month Chris from Northcote, aged 10, wanted to know whether he should write “Chris’ cricket bat” or “Chris’s cricket bat”, but mostly the segment is an airing of grievances. A catharsis. A blood-letting. It is public therapy and I’m pleased to be part of it.

But often I feel I’m not the adviser they’re looking for. People want me to bang the grammar gavel and solemnly rule that “irregardless” is not a word, and that it’s wrong to say your team is “versing” another team, and that sports commentators who start sentences with “for mine” must be driven from our towns and cities. (There are lots of complaints about sports commentary.)

So really it’s a segment about language change. And I love language change! Thus, I disappoint the listeners. Change is the thing they revile.

“Some Method should be thought on for ascertaining and fixing our Language for ever,” wrote Jonathan Swift in 1712. His instinct was to preserve. But languages evolve – like viruses. English has been a very successful virus, now spoken by 1.5 billion earthlings thanks to its wily shape shifting. And these days, our human desire to somehow fix the language in place is being thwarted at a faster pace than ever.

“The internet has REVOLUTIONISED language change,” enthuses former AP Stylebook editor David Minthorn, in one of the most gloriously nerdy videos on YouTube. A few weeks ago, Dictionary of Slang author Jonathon Green gleefully tweeted: “… the lexicographer’s challenge was always: ‘where do we find our data’. Now it’s where do we dare allow ourselves to stop looking. Because there is always more on offer.”

Now that every English speaker in the world can talk to every other English speaker in the world, the virus is mutating vociferously. The modern grievance airer must keep pace. So I have compiled a list of changes for which to watch out in 2018.

1. Semantic change thanks to the internet

Trolls are not just bridge dwellers anymore, a cloud isn’t always a visible mass of condensed watery vapour and a mouse is sometimes a mouse. Computers have given us so much. But mainly they have given us the internet, where we can wake to a new definition of woke. Definition expansions happen when usages spread from small language communities to larger ones. “Spread” being the key word because, as we know, “fetch” never happened.

My colleague recently tweeted to apologise that her posts were “so thirsty tonight”. The next day I asked what “thirsty” meant and I have never felt so old. She did, in fact, act quite extra about it. I’m usually the goat at knowing words so I was salty. And her outfit was snatched, which made things worse. The whole thing was not lit and I have receipts.

2. Syntactical change thanks to the internet

I am tired because life. I am angry because the internet. “Because” is a preposition now! Ewww. But also I love it. If I were a 2014 Facebook user, I’d comment: “This.” Because “this”, as a demonstrative pronoun, can be useful in place of an approving clause or exclamation. Those who use the “This” sentence, though, are a dying breed. So if you haven’t started on that, skip straight to an emoji for your emphatic enjoiner.☝️

3. Semantic and syntactical change thanks to television

Is this a thing? Yes it is. In fact “a thing” is a thing, thanks to television show The West Wing. And another thing is “re-gifting”, a verb birthed from a noun by Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes. Annoyed much? Hardly anyone stuck the terminal adverb “much” on things before Buffy did. These changes are old news in 2018, though. I think television might be losing its edge.

4. Inflection change led by Kanye West

“Real rappers is hard to find.” If anyone can eliminate verb modification from English, it’s Kanye. About time!

5. Conversion thanks to advertising

In grammar, “conversion” refers to a word’s shift into a different role or part of speech. It’s what happened when Facebook converted “friend” from a noun into a verb (and gave us the vital new infinitive “to unfriend”) and when corporate memos did the same thing to “action”. These changes were actioned a while ago, however. The new thing is turning adjectives into nouns. Use Nutella and you’re “spreading the happy”; shop at Sephora and you’re “celebrating your extraordinary”; connect to the internet with AT&T and you’re “rethinking possible”. If you cannot keep up, La Trobe University will help you to “find your clever”.

6. Word and phrase coinages from the internet meme factory

New words! New phrases! Sure, they’re annoying, but if they’re useful, they stick.

One of them stuck hard late last year when the Macquarie Dictionary named “milkshake duck” its word of the year. Noun: a person who is initially viewed positively by the media but is then discovered to have something questionable about them that causes a sharp decline in their popularity. The term was coined in 2016 by Australian Twitter user Ben Ward, aka @pixelatedboat: “The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the duck is racist.”

Twitter seems to invent words faster than any other social media platform. Not that they all catch on. In 2015 I cheered for brave user @murrman5 and his new noun: “‘I came downstairs for a zip of juice and noticed the TV was gone so I called you guys’ [cop stops writing] did you say zip of juice?” Retweets: 3,293, but I haven’t heard a peep about “zip” since. For a brief moment, though, to use a phrase coined last month by the Victorian roads minister, Luke Donnellan, it was “better than a kick in the dick”.

7. Punctuation change led by smartphones

If you’ve ever typed “apple” into your phone and been autocorrected to “Apple”, you’ll know that small-screen communication is causing George Orwell to spin like a beachball in his grave. But punctuation seems to be the real victim of our incessant texting.

A small storm blew up in 2016 when senior grammarian David Crystal observed a change in the character of the full stop. He put forward, at a British writers festival, that in text messages the full stop has ceased to be a humble and simple ender of sentences. Instead, it now turns what might otherwise be a friendly “Fine!” into a passive-aggressive “Fine.” Interviewed afterwards, Crystal explained: “It is not necessary to use a period in a text message, so to make something explicit that is already implicit makes a point of it. It’s like when you say, ‘I am not going – period.’ It’s a mark. It can be aggressive. It can be emphatic. It can mean, ‘I have no more to say’.”

Is texting putting the full stop out to pasture? In its report on the incident, the New York Times included not a single full stop – and truth be told I didn’t notice [And did you notice the absence of one here?]

8. ‘Meaning leakage’ thanks to politicians, bureaucrats and business writers

There’s a dark side to hating change. Self-appointed language gatekeepers are often attempting to enforce a central English. This sort of intransigent rule-booking reaches its stinky nadir in the refusal to accept a word’s semantic shift into slur-dom (as in “fag”) or a word’s reclamation by the slurred themselves (as in “queer”). It’s grammatically blinkered and, I feel, a failure of the human spirit.

But some gatekeeping comes from a generous place, the place where words are valued for their meaning-carrying powers. These grievers rage against the kind of language change that allows people to communicate less. To obscure truth, as Don Watson would say, in a weaselly way.

In US political reporting we now have “alt right”, a term that paints a benign sheen over a white nationalist branch of conservatism. In its topical guide for the 2016 election, AP Stylebook ruled alt right “a public-relations device to make its supporters’ actual beliefs less clear and more acceptable to a broader audience”.

In bureaucracy, we have people noun-ifying verbs to distance themselves from any clear action: “Consideration will be given by the committee to the provision of advice on this policy issue in the near future.” (The advising is in there somewhere, but it’s a long way from the main verb.)

In business, as ever, we have people making things up to sound, as they might say, “leading-edge”. Projects are “moving forward” and “synergistic”, and people are “unpacking” “the takeaway”.

But let’s take this offline. The real intention of such jargon is to make others feel like lesser human assets. So if you want to stay ahead of the curve this year, definitely keep an eye out for “coopertition”, “change agent”, “de-skilling” and “invitation to leave (ITL)”. Or gouge your eyes out. Either way, some grievances deserve to be aired.