"Evolving language? Or just falling standards?"

Susan Schwartz, in her article called "Evolving language? Or just falling standards?" on Times Colonist, touches on an important dilemma regarding the evolution of languages. Most of us must have heard from our parents or grandparents that they sometimes have a difficult time understanding us even though we are speaking the same language. For example, when I talk to my grandmother in Turkish, I sometimes say that something is "wickedly beautiful" if I want to describe an exceptional beauty. She turns to me with a confused gaze in her eyes and asks whether what I am describing is wicked or beautiful. These two words have opposite meanings, but my generation has started long ago to use the words "wicked" and "beautiful" together in order to emphasize the beauty even more. The same phenomenon is true for English, too.

Similarly, a couple of months ago, I heard one of my English-speaking friends describing something as "stupidly beautiful." He did not mean that the beauty was stupid - he actually meant that something was stupefyingly beautiful. When I told him that the phrase "stupidly beautiful" does not really work, he said that stupidly and stupefyingly sounded very similar, so they could as well mean the same thing, he argued.

Why do we need to use the word "wicked" to express an exceptional beauty, or why are we fine with using the word "stupidly" instead of "stupefyingly," then? Is our language evolving to a point where words can be used interchangeably, or are we losing the essence of our language? In her article, Schwartz asks the same question whether this is a case of evolving language or falling standards due to sloppy use of language.

I would argue that there is a fine line with evolving language and falling standards. It is greatly promising to know that every year hundreds of thousands of new words are added to the lexicon of English. As our lives change, the words and phrases we frequently change do transform as well. We look for better ways to communicate through our language. However, I believe that we arrived at a point where the evolution of language became very spontaneous and arbitrary. There is no need to describe something as "wickedly beautiful" - "exceptionally beautiful" would definitely suffice. As Susan Schwartz mentions in her article, there is a "danger inherent in allowing standards to relax to the point where they no longer do the work of standards, so that words and phrases are so routinely overused or misused that they lose their meaning."

Unfortunately, the misuse of language does not seem to concern young people. It is usually the older generations who complain about the misuse of language, because they are able to witness the changes in the use of language over years. For us, young people, though, it is not the same situation. We usually feel proud when we realize that the words and phrases we use are unknown to our parents and grandparents, because that gives us a sense of progression and improvement. However, we should realize that language evolution and misuse are not the same things, and we have been confusing the two for a long time.

Link to article: http://www.timescolonist.com/life/Evolving+language+just+falling+standards/3063113/story.html