After reading Stephen Pinker, I've reformed. Even Samuel Johnson, he points out, realised that there is something not right about insisting on correct style where the speakers do not create actual confusion. And now most linguists are of the view that that attitude is unsustainable. Roughly, since a sense of grammar is wired-in, it is idle to legislate: people will talk grammatically without help from schoolmasters. Their grammar might not be what the schoolmaster would like, but it is perfectly good grammar all the same. So the idea that language could decline is a little like supposing that kidney function could decline. Nevertheless, some local degenerations are not to be borne. I'll post a few exemplary confusions about particular words and phrases that really get up my wire, as my friend Barry Sharp would put it; one per blog post:
disinterested. To say that one is disinterested in doing such-and-such used to mean that one was not doing it for some self-interested motive, seeking to gain advantage. It was a term of praise, as one would describe a fair, impartial, unprejudiced judge. But it now means simply 'uninterested'. Some fool runs across the word and thinks it must mean 'uninterested'. He begins to use it that way, thinking it sounds sophisticated. The virus spreads. Thus a term of elegant compactness is rendered useless and redundant. The learned person must know that using the word in the new climate will only create misunderstandings. This one gets up Pinker's wire too. Here is an example from the Times (2 June 2005), commenting on reports that use of the pill decreases the female libido:
Unlike the official bods, such as the Royal College of GPs and the Family Planning Association who were more concerned that a story like this might cause women to abandon the Pill en masse, I predicted that hordes of sexually disinterested women would be clamouring for the ultimate chemical get-out clause, because according to the study, the anti-sex hormones linger in some women for like, ever, and how much easier to blame a pill than the usual stuff: feeling tired, depressed....
