Published: June 05, 2009 10:22 am      

Lee Ward: 06/07/09 — Being flexible with the language proves difficult

For some of us, it’s difficult to accept change.

I learned early that if you can be flexible, it will benefit you for your lifetime, whether you have to show flexibility with family or friends or at work.

Change is inevitable in everything, even in the English language. That is, perhaps, the hardest change for me to accept.

I don’t like change in the language because I believe it comes from laziness and ignorance. The language changes because of the way people use it. If the majority of the people begin using, or misusing, a word, eventually that word’s meaning changes into a meaning that had previously been wrong. That just doesn’t seem like a sensible reason for change.

Changes in the language have come rapidly in the last 20 years as compared to the rate at which the language changed traditionally, mostly because of technology. We hear a wider variety of people speak and we learn and accept their verbal idiosyncracies, even make them our own. We are overexposed to other language cultures; we don’t realize how easily we steal manners of speaking from other cultures or subcultures. It seems natural to speak like someone we’re not so we don’t think about it. It causes our language to change much more quickly.

I’m trying to avoid being disappointed about the change in language because even if we weren’t lazy and ignorant and even if we didn’t steal language use and expressions from cultures outside our own, I know language would change. My linguistics teacher in college said so. I didn’t like what I was hearing even then, but I believed him because it was a very difficult course and I didn’t know what he was talking about most of the time, so I decided he must be very intelligent and when I did understand him, I should believe him.

One of the words that hasn’t so much changed as lost meaning is the word “nice.” I’m sure at one time, the word was high praise, but nowadays, it’s a bland word that nobody wants to use or hear, and I blame overuse of the word for the loss of meaning. In fact, my mind nearly goes blank when someone calls me “nice.”

Except for the one memory of a guy I used to work with. I must have done something to help him because he said to me, “You’re a nice girl. Too bad there’s no call for nice girls anymore.”

LEE WARD can be reached at lward@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2661.