Twenty-five years ago Harvey Daniels wrote a wonderful book, Famous Last
Words: The American Language Crisis Reconsidered. His first sentence:
"The deathwatch over American English has begun again." He wrote:
Predictions of linguistic doom have become a growth industry. Time
magazine asks: "Can't Anyone Here Speak English?" while Newsweek
explains "Why Johnny Can't Write." TV Guide warns of "The New
Illiteracy," Saturday Review bemoans "The Plight of the English
Language," and even United Airline's Mainliner Magazine blusters "Who's
Been Messing Around with Our Mother Tongue?"
Daniels' book shows a telling and amusing pattern. What the voices of
doom say about the death of the English language/writing/literacy/the
sentence today is almost exactly what they were saying in 1983-and also
what they were saying in 1950, 1900, 1850, and on back as far as you
care to go. So when you read this: "From every college in the country
goes up the cry, 'Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate.' Every high
school is in disrepair because pupils are so ignorant of the merest
rudiments," you might want to check the date (that one was written in
1917). How about "Our language is degrading very fast"? That was poet
James Beattie in 1785. Addison, Swift, even William Caxton in 1478 all
said that our language was deteriorating into chaos.
The hallmark of all these jeremiads is the fiction that in the past the
state of the language was really good, but today we are in a sorry state
and the future is dire. The only problem is that it's hard to find when
the good old days were because at wherever era you look people were also
saying exactly the same thing then.
If we've been on a downward spiral every since Hengist and Horsa got off
the boat in 443, it's a miracle we're able to talk at all today. One
can't read these "writing on the wall" laments without thinking they
tell us a lot more about human psychology than about any actual defect
or deterioration in language.
Dick
________________________________
Richard Veit
Department of English
University of North Carolina Wilmington
________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Carol Morrison
Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 10:27 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: The Death of the Sentence?
Hi everyone. This was in my NCTE inbox this morning, so some of you may
have read it. (This is only part of the article). I bolded the second to
last line because it interests me: Does anyone know who "invented" the
sentence?
The Fate of The Sentence: Is the Writing On the Wall?
By Linton Weeks
<http://projects.washingtonpost.com/staff/email/linton+weeks/>
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 15, 2008; Page M01
The demise of orderly writing: signs everywhere.
One recent report, young Americans don't write well.
In a survey, Internet language -- abbreviated wds, :) and txt msging --
seeping into academic writing.
But above all, what really scares a lot of scholars: the impending death
of the English sentence.
Librarian of Congress James Billington
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/James+Billington?tid=in
formline> , for one. "I see creeping inarticulateness," he says, and the
demise of the basic component of human communication: the sentence.
This assault on the lowly -- and mighty -- sentence, he says, is
symptomatic of a disease potentially fatal to civilization. If the
sentence croaks, so will critical thought. The chronicling of history.
Storytelling itself.
He has a point. The sentence itself is a story, with a beginning, a
middle and an end. Something happens in a sentence. Without subjects,
there are no heroes or villains. Without verbs, there is no action.
Without objects, nothing is moved, changed, destroyed or created.
Plus, simple sentences clarify complex situations. ("Jesus wept.")
Since its invention centuries ago, the sentence has brought order to
chaos. It's the handle on the pitcher, a tonic chord in music, a stair
step chiseled in a mountainside.
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