Acronyms Idioms And Slang The Evolution Of

Acronyms, Idioms, And Slang- The Evolution Of The English Lan Essay, Research Paper

Acronyms, Idioms and Slang: the Evolution of the English Language.

Although the English language is only 1500 years old, it has evolved

at an incredible rate: so much so, that, at first glance, the average person

in America today would find most Shakespearean literature confusing without

the aid of an Old-English dictionary or Cliff’s Notes. Yet Shakespear lived

just 300 years ago! Some are seeing this is a sign of the decline of the

English language, that people are becoming less and less literate. As R.

Walker writes in his essay “Why English Needs Protecting,” “the moral and

economic decline of Great Britain in the post-war era has been mirrored by

a decline in the English language and literature.” I, however, disagree. It

seems to me that the point of language is to communicate ? to express some

idea or exchange some form of information with someone else. In this sense,

the English language seems, not necessarily to be improving or decaying,

but optimizing ? becoming more efficient.

It has been both said and observed that the technological evolution

of a society tends to grow exponentially rather than linearly. The same can

also be said of the English language. English is evolving on two levels:

culturally and technologically. And both of these are unavoidable. Perhaps

the more noticeable of the two today is the technological evolution of

English. When the current scope of a given language is insufficient to

describe a new concept, invention, or property, then there becomes a

necessity to alter, combine, or create words to provide a needed definition.

For example, the field of Astro-Physics has provided the English language

with such new terms as pulsar, quasar, quark, black hole, photon, neutrino,

positron etc. Similarly, our society has recently be inundated with a

myriad of new terms from the field of Computer Science: motherboard, hard

drive, Internet, megabyte, CD, IDE, SCSI, TCP/IP, WWW, HTTP, DMA, GUI and

literally hundreds of others acronyms this particular field is notorious

for. While some of these terms, such as black hole and hard drive, are just

a combination of pre-existing words, many of them are new words altogether.

To me it seems clear that anything that serves to increase the academic

vocabulary of a society should be welcomed, although not all would agree.

For example, many have accused this trend of creating an acronym for

everything to be impersonal and confusing. And, while I agree that there is

really no need to abbreviate Kentucky Fried Chicken, it does become tiring

to have to constantly say Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or Transfer

Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) when they are both used so

frequently when dealing with computers on a network. Not only is it futile

for one to reject these inevitably new additions to our language, one would

do oneself well to actually learn them.

The cultural evolution of English is not as distinguishable, nor

seemingly as necessary, as the technological evolution of English, yet it

exists nonetheless. It is on this level that the English language has

primarily been accused of being in a state of decline, specifically by the

incorporation of “slang” into mainstream language. But Webster’s Dictionary

defines slang as:

1: language peculiar to a particular group: as a: ARGOT b:

JARGON 2: an informal nonstandard vocabulary composed

typically of coinages, arbitrarily changed words, and

extravagant, forced, or facetious figures of speech.

In this sense, much of what is commonly thought to be proper English can be

said to be slang. When the U.S. declared its independence from England, one

of the things scholars did was change the spelling of certain English words:

colour was changed to color, theatre to theater, etc. In addition, Americans

have, over time, given new names for certain things: what we call a trunk

(of a car), the English call a boot; what we call an apartment, the English

call a flat, etc. But because they have been in use for so long, they are

no longer considered to be slang words. R. Walker writes, “if slang and

jargon are fixed in the language, a process begun by their addition to the

dictionary, it helps to make them official.” It seems then, that a word is

slang only if it has not yet been accepted, that it is instead a candidate

whose initiation into the English language is determined by popular opinion

and time.

Slang in America today, while varying from region to region, has one

major theme in common ? it is short. And while history has shown that most

of it will die ? never making official “word” status ? to be replaced by new

slang words, some of it will stay. The word dis (short for disrespect), for

example, has become a popular word used by more t

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