I would like to know when that wonderful time was when people didn't make grammatical errors, when Americans were routinely literate, when students could write fluently, when no one had problems with the who/whom distinction or used "criteria" as a singular noun. Folk wisdom says it was about a generation ago. Of course, that's what folk wisdom has always said.
 
A generation ago (as folk wisdom would have it) the English language was just fine and people used it well. Today, however, the language is deteriorating, and people no longer speak or write it properly. That's a common complaint in 2004, and it's easy to find other similar complaints today--just as it was easy to find them in 1975, and in 1950, and in 1925, and in 1800 and 1600 and 1400. People seem always to have believed the language was on the decline and to have expressed that belief in almost identical terms ever since there has been an English language. Harvey Daniels did a nice job of presenting these complaints through the ages in his 1983 book Famous Last Words: The American Language Crisis Reconsidered. The evident conclusion is that such fulminations have their origin in the human psyche far more than in objective reality. 
 
If our language were on a thousand year downward slope, we'd all be muttering gibberish by now. But just because past Jeremiahs were wrong, that doesn't prove that now isn't the one time in our history when our language really is falling apart. The odds are against this hypothesis, however, and before accepting it, we need to see objective evidence and not the glib anecdotes that Charrow presents.
 
Dick Veit
UNCW English Department

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