Ever-changing ocean of words

When sloppy writing is defended to a grammar curmudgeon (I'll pretend I don't know any), the argument that usually infuriates him or her is: "You knew what I meant".

One reason is that it's a call for mediocrity, but sometimes I wonder if the deeper reason is that it's true. I'm sure it's not often that a misplaced comma or a verb not in agreement with subject has resulted in death or injury, or the loss of millions of dollars.

It's not an ease about the language I always had, but in addition to mellowing as I age, I read a book called Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson. He manages to combine painstaking detail with readability, and the result is a work that has made me think very differently about English.

It's is a dense history of the language, and nearly every sentence has a surprising fact about the words we use.

Also, being written by an American, it offers a much-needed different perspective. The disdain British English speakers, both from the homeland and its colonies, have for Americanisms is completely misplaced, as we see repeatedly in the book.

So many words we take for granted are (or were) Americanisms. Consider just some from a partial list in the book: telephone, teenager, department store, radio, beeline, raincoat, and even ‘stiff upper lip'.

Also, many usages in America are actually from earlier days. The use of ‘mad' for ‘angry' isn't the mainstream acceptance of teenage slang as I once thought, but actually a remnant of Elizabethan England that held out in America even as the meaning changed in England. ‘Fall' for autumn is another example, as is the oft sniffed upon use of ‘progress' as a verb. ‘Shall we progress this project' isn't a crass Americanism, but a living example of the language of Shakespeare.

And as for the common accusation of Americanisms being too workmanlike, I often remember two examples that contradict this. In Britain, a ‘mudguard' keeps spatter away — it's a literal, awkward, even ugly, word. In America, it's a much more poetic ‘fender' — lending the object an air of knightly heroism.

Twists and turns

And in Britain and its colonies, you descend a mountain by negotiating ‘hairpin bends', a fairly unimaginative visual connection. In America, you use ‘switchbacks' — a word that conveys the fear and excitement of navigating steep descents. Or consider the well-known one related to in-building transportation. Would you rather be ‘elevated' or merely ‘lifted'?

It's not that I'm supporting one side or another, but that there really aren't sides here. Words may flow from one country for a while, but as they become entrenched, people forget where they came from. Maybe in the future, there'll be a huge flow of words from Asia, many based on local slang.

Grammar grouches in America may bemoan the vulgarity of these new words, not realising that many are returning Americanisms that have been out of use in America for a couple of hundred years. It's a mistake even English men of letters such as Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge made about early Americanisms.

In a way, this teaches new respect for the language. We talk about ‘mastery' of English, and feel ownership of it because we dream in it. But too often, we forget that we know and use just a fraction of a seething, ever-changing ocean of words. And that nearly every time someone makes a grammatical error, we know exactly what they meant.

Gautam Raja is a journalist based in the US.