Language change articles

harry ritchie - the guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/13/literally-broken-english-language-definition - Have we literally broken the English language? Well, no, but the redefinition of 'literally' leaves it in a rather awkward state. Perhaps it's a word best avoided for the moment

- Literally is the most misused word and now changed definition.
- Not just in a literal manner or sense but also now literally can be used to acknowledge strong feeling or empphasis.
- Didnt break language, just proved that language is organic - is it slipping out of control?
- Even when the word is used correctly, often a surprise to the listener.
- Not much we can do with the word other than avoid it completley.
- Literally been playfully abused since the time of Walter Scott, in 1827 before the electric light.
- Used to be fun and surprising in the 1800's, its getting a bit old now.
- Word has picked up lots of baggage, talking like a teenage girl for a decade.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10971949 - How the internet is changing language.

- 'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and many countries are developing their own internet slang, not everyones up to speed with the language change.
- In April 2010 the informal online banter of the internet-savvy collided with the traditional and austere language of the court room.
- "Rickroll is a meme or internet kind of trend that started on 4chan where users - it's basically a bait and switch. Users link you to a video of Rick Astley performing Never Gonna Give You Up,"
- "The internet is an amazing medium for languages,"
- "Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly."
-  "Computer slang is developing pretty fast in Ukraine,"
- For English speakers there are cult websites devoted to cult dialects - "LOLcat" - a phonetic and deliberately grammatically incorrect caption that accompanies a picture of a cat, and "Leetspeak" in which some letters are replaced by numbers which stem from programming code.
- Txt spk , one language change that has definitely been overhyped is so-called text speak, a mixture of often vowel-free abbreviations and acronyms, says Prof Crystal.
- "People say that text messaging is a new language and that people are filling texts with abbreviations - but when you actually analyse it you find they're not," he said.
- Stephen Fry once blasted the acronym CCTV (closed circuit television) for being "such a bland, clumsy, rythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word".


http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/11/capitalism-language-raymond-williams - Be a user, not a cconsumer: how capitalism has changed our language - Capitalism is altering our language - and Raymond Williams saw it coming more than 50 years ago.

- According to a report by researchers at the University of California Los Angeles, English has become a peculiarly capitalist language – though they don't quite put it like that.
- Some academics would rather not use the c-word. What has happened over those 200 years was the rise to dominance of capitalism, which obviously changed, and changes, our language and thinking.
- The researchers discovered a more algorithmic and superficial version of something that the Welsh socialist writer Raymond Williams had already tried to uncover – the way that English had become a class language, where loaded words (and, as he often pointed out, pronunciations) were accepted as "standard".
- In Communications (1962), Williams looked more closely at the use of martial metaphors in the press – "bomb", "hit", "battle", "bout" – macho terms that immediately attempt to determine the reader's opinion on a given subject without explicitly doing so. In The Long Revolution, Williams also took a closer look at the word "consumer", a word we now use entirely unthinkingly to describe the "consumption" of everything from shoes to food to health care.

- Even a word as central to the current debate as "austerity" comes with its own bias: originally from the Old French austerite meaning "harshness or cruelty", it carries in Britain also a positive meaning, being associated with the self-restraint at the expense of the public good which was required by the wartime economy, when nowadays it is used to justify policies that effect the exact opposite. But to reveal the pernicious assumptions behind these professedly innocuous words will take more than a sophisticated search engine.