The ever-flowing river of language
(From Andrew Malone, one of our Briefing readers in Melbourne, Australia.)
As a linguistic pedant, I've grown to love the precision of Kel Richards and his WordWatch column. As a Bible-believing evangelical, I can see the merit in calling myself a ‘fundamentalist’ in the more literal sense of the word. So imagine my horror when Kel Richards took such a term to task some time ago (Briefing #301, 2003). But he was right that “words don't stand still ... in the ever-flowing river that is the English language”. Hence I have reluctantly relinquished the label—at least for now.
So I couldn't help noticing an otherwise inconsequential comment in October, buried in a humour column at the back of the weekend magazine of the major newspapers published in Australia's major capitals. A reader had written in to complain that, although his (?) friends were accepting of his homosexuality, they had moved with the times. Like others around them, they were starting to use the word ‘gay’ to refer to something other than sexual orientation. He was taking offence that the revised term now detracted from his status, and perhaps even reflected negatively upon him.
To be sure, the fundamentalist in me felt a flash of vindication. How many of us rue the fact that the lovely word ‘gay’ has become so polarized, we can no longer enjoy its other meanings? (Just last week a television columnist wrote about the guilty pleasure of giggling whenever she tries to order a Golden Gaytime ice-cream.) How fascinating to watch someone who had (in my eyes) misappropriated a term from me now complain that others were misappropriating it from him! He was the one lamenting that the term was changing and becoming pejorative. He was the one intimating that society ought to take steps to preserve it from such decline.
As a more objective observation, it was simply interesting to perceive so starkly the ‘ever-flowing river’ of language at work, even within the space of a few decades. I wonder when ‘fundamentalist’ might come back into fashion ...