If your daddy said never to wear pink shoes and you wear them, you may feel you are breaking the rules. In a sense, you are and if you are still under his rule, he may dock your allowance or show how hurt he is. But even if he is long deceased, you may feel that doing so is just wrong.
I suspect that some uses of language feel wrong because that is not what I was taught in school. "I ain't going" was frowned on in my schooling and my family so it sounds wrong but I am not at all sure it is. One of the features of getting old is that I get to spend time around people who grew up in a different time and they have different habits and convictions. Language use and habits change over time, for sure. (We never said "for sure", we said "all right" in the same place to mean the same thing: definitely, certainly.)
I am not offended by people communicating text messages of "U?" meaning "how is your life going?", "Did you sleep well?" and "What is your level of pain today?" Seems both inventive and poetic, to me. I was surprised at the level of anger a man displayed over what was evidently a language sacrilege when others communicate in such original vanity-plate ways.
I do think there can be such a thing as language mistakes, uses that mislead or otherwise cost us, as signal senders or receivers. When a 30-ish comedian uses the "F" word two or three times per sentence and the audience of the same age, laughs heartily at each occurrence, I feel, typically for my age and upbringing, that the material is just not that funny. Just as the reading teacher sometimes tells students who come to a word they don't know to just read it as "teapot" and go on, I feel that expletives become just so much sawdust in the flour when over-used.
I don't think that I can control nor even influence much the general drift of language use. Advertisers and other communicators work to have their messages get attention and be retained. So, they employ all sorts of tricks and inventions. The use of "lite" to mean a mini-version or a low calorie alternative or a short course or program seems widespread.
When the screenwriters and movie trailer and ad people used the title "The Perfect Storm", they meant that the storm was perfectly arranged to cause maximum trouble. However, adopting the use of the phrase "perfect storm" in weather forecasts to alert people to an especially dangerous one seems less than wise word choice. The word 'perfect' still has its lovely ring of good, best and using it in connection with the 'perfect' rape or 'perfect' bankruptcy or such gets old fast. In me at least, a perfect storm is going to be scary, damaging and the genuine opposite of perfect. I vote against such usage.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
