People often complain that English is deteriorating under the influence of new technology, adolescent fads and loose grammar. Why does this nonsensical belief persist?

I read this article expecting something very different.

There are, I would argue, two different questions:

• Is the use of the English language as a whole deteriorating, particularly in published works?
• Is the use of the English language in everyday communication deteriorating?

I would argue that the answer to both is no, and I expect that the author would agree. However, it is the second question that the title seems to allude to, mentioning technology, while it is the first question that the author largely addresses. For the most part, the examples of fears of deterioration throughout history that the author presents refer to the deterioration of language usage by literate writers of careful, and usually published, works. Here we see the evolution of language, and the tendency to be most comfortable with the styles we grew up around. Here we see the annoying complaints that are often quite ignorant.

Yet I would argue that the reason for the answer to the second question being no could be quite different. Compared to published works, and careful written communications, quite a bit of everyday communication is rather bad, in a certain sense. This has just always been the case: look at quick letters from the past, for example, or exact transcriptions or recordings of something being said, particularly by someone not making an effort to speak carefully. There have always been confusing oddities, there have always been fads in usage and slang that have arisen and died off quickly, and there has always been grammar that is actually bad and confusing, beyond stylistic choices—though recalling 19th and early 20th century letters with less-educated authors, I suspect that grammar has gotten better with improved literacy and public education.

What has changed, I feel, is that as a result of technology, quick, casual conversations which would previously have been largely spoken and ephemeral are now often both written and semi-permanent. Thus type of writing we see in texts, in quick comments online, and so on can't really be compared to written works of the past, but is instead a written analogue of spoken speech, written in circumstances much closer to spoken communication of the past: no one a hundred years ago for example, would have had a conversation entirely via written messages each composed over a few seconds—often in far less time than it would have taken to physically write the messages by hand.

As a result, this writing does take on a rather different form than writing of the past. And in that, it is fascinating. The types of things that we would ordinarily see in casual spoken speech have counterparts in quick written communication, and people have developed ways of both writing quickly and trying to express in written conversation the nuances that would have been expressed by tone and expression in spoken conversation.

As an aside, it is somewhat surprising to see the comment from the Plain English Campaign. I remember hearing about them years ago, and had thought that they were interested in the quite reasonable goal of fighting against overly complex and difficult to understand language in government and corporate documents.