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Originally Posted by dmcc  I did a law degree and work with lawyers in the Civil Service, so I know all about verbosity and grammar...
The trend in English over the last few hundred years is to simplify; we got rid of gender, number agreement and all voices apart from the possessive and the subjunctive (which people don't know how to use properly anyway). In Victorian times, no journalist worth his port-and-brandy would write "a crowd of people watched the building burn" but rather "a vast concourse was assembled to witness a great conflagration consume the edifice". However, there is a massive difference between simplification of grammar and construction and the atrocities that are happening to the English language today. |
Very true the simplification of English was for a noble purpose - to make information avaible to everyone regardless of background or social standing (much like mainland China's reform of there writen language). However like you said the curent issues with language are from people useing and mis-aplying regional/social/racial expressions into the general language without proper context in a atempt to sound cool, show belonging and as a tool to exclude people not aware of current youth culture trends.