24 November 2014
Joe Gilbert has created English 3.0, a twenty-minute documentary on the state of the English language, featuring the likes of Tom Chatfield, David Crystal, Robert McCrum, Fiona McPherson and Simon Horobin
English 3.0 from Joe Gilbert on Vimeo.
It’s quite good. One comment mentioned by several of those interviewed that I have my doubts about concerns the “revolution” in language due to the internet. The claim is that the language is changing faster than ever. I’m not so sure that is true. Rather, we may simply be noticing the change more. People are coining (and abandoning) new words at the same rate they always have. But now with the internet, we see them, where before the new coinage was confined to a small coterie of the coiner’s friends and acquaintances. The impact on lexicography is the danger that these words will be ephemeral and the dictionary will become filled with obsolescent coinages that had a brief flash of existence—words that never would have risen to the attention of lexicographer fifty years ago because they died too quickly.
(Tip o’ the Hat to Stan Carey over at the Sentence First blog.
