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Originally Posted by Fordim Hedgethistle
Hey Mithalwen, is this true....?
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Which bit?
I hate the term Human resources certainly. At least "Personnel" emphasised the person. Human resources make me think of that Dilbert cartoon which says that "we were wrong all the time we said that our employees were our most important resource... paperclips are our most important resource. .."
I suppose to quote the title of one of those books I should have read for my degree "Language change - process or decay?". I would lean to the decay side. I find soundbite politics depressing. I have sat in at a meeting this week contucted almost entirely in cliche. Can someone explain what an "iterative" (?) process is? On second thoughts, please don't. Meanwhile, I received an e-mail from someone who said "I have got round the problem by frigging my sheet". Either that has homophonous/polysemic aspects of which I was previously unaware or it was random information that caused me to choke on the completely foul coffee.
I would admit to being part of the decline. I have been fascinated by language as long as I can remember. I have a couple of degrees in English and yet, I have wobbly spelling and a fairly hazy grasp of the finer points of punctuation. My writing style is generally stream of consciousness.
Even bearing this in mind, I am shocked by the level of literacy and knowledge displayed by many youngsters who are clearly intelligent (not the ones I meet on the downs) and occasionally by the inability of people earning about four times what I do to write a coherent letter.
Language is the thing that distinguishes us as a species. It is a powerful force for political control. Synchronic and diachronic linguistics mirror the history of the world.
I live in a society where, to speak english correctly opens you up to ridicule, where we are governed by a man who, despite a privileged education, cannot articulate the word "government", where the education system has been debased and tinkered with ..... Soon English will be preserved by highly literate foreigners while the natives regress to communicate in grunts.
Yet there are a few bright spots - maybe all is not lost when cockney slang can contrive "Listerine" mean anti-american. There are some glorious neologisms like "chuddies". Otherwise, I might join with my old lecturer's campaign to revive what he termed "perfectly good words that have fallen out of use". I am possibly a hopeless case, having had an upbringing in the " A lounge is something they have in hotels, darling" mould
and consequently a rather miserable time at the rather rough comprehensive school I attended. I learnt too late the need to be bilingual in myown language....
Ah well..... what was the question...?