“When we Americans are done with the English language it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy.”— Finley Peter Dunne
When I graduated from college, sometime near the end of the Stone Age, we had a marvelous little book to guide our writing: “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. Its crisp rules and no-nonsense advice helped us write clearly and correctly. I was therefore shocked, decades later, to discover that Strunk and White’s rules were not carved in stone. The language I grew up with has been cheerfully trampled, twisted, and redefined. Sometimes the changes make sense; sometimes they make me want to clutch my red pen.
Look at a few examples.
“Unique” used to mean “One of a kind,” an absolute with no degrees. You couldn’t be more unique than unique. Now, often used to mean “unusual” or “very rare,” and frequently modified (“very unique”), to the horror of old-school purists; a usage now blessed by Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary.
“Beg the question” is a logical fallacy: assuming the truth of something that still needs proof. Debate judges deduct points for it. Now it commonly means “to prompt a question,” as in, “The suspect was seen driving away from the accident at high speed which begs the question: Was he negligent?”
Literally means “in a factual, non-figurative sense.” Now it is used for emphasis in figurative speech (“I literally died laughing”). Infamous means deeply dishonorable, a public disgrace; in older British law, a status that could bar testimony in court. It’s still “notoriously bad,” but often softened, more pop-culture mischief than moral outrage, “She’s infamous for being fashionably late.”
Gender refers to a grammatical category (masculine, feminine, neuter). I suspect it was expanded by some prudish folk, who were embarrassed by the word “sex,” to include identity — a social and psychological construct, distinct from biological sex.
Virus in addition to being a pathogenic microorganism is now also a malicious piece of computer code. A cloud is a visible mass of condensed water vapor. Lately it has transitioned from a metaphor to literally meaning, “virtual storage space for data.”
Spam is a brand of canned meat that merged with annoying, unwanted digital messages. An algorithm, once the exclusive domain of mathematics, is now a complex decision-making system, especially one that decides what you see online.
Hack once meant to chop roughly but now means to break into a computer system or to devise a clever shortcut (“life hack”). It is also used as a noun to identify the person who hacks.
They, a plural pronoun, is also a singular, gender-neutral pronoun (“Taylor said they were not at fault.”). Friend, a person you know and like, is now a verb meaning “to add someone to your social media circle.” Influencer, a term rarely used in the past, as anyone or anything exerting influence, now is used more commonly to identify a person with social media reach who promotes products or ideas.
Woke was slang for being alert to social injustice (1940s–60s) and morphed into a politically loaded term, sometimes used sincerely, often satirically or critically.
A troll is a mythical creature lurking under a bridge, but now we use it to describe a person who stirs trouble online.
So here we are, adrift in a world where clouds hold no rain, spam isn’t edible, friends come with an “unfriend” button, and trolls carry wi-fi instead of clubs. Our algorithms decide what we see, hacks solve problems we didn’t know we had, and “literally” means “figuratively.” The English language hasn’t just been run over by a musical comedy — it’s been cast, costumed, and sent on tour.
If Strunk and White could see it now, they’d probably “beg the question” of whether to roll over in their graves, become woke and update “The Elements of Style”, or just friend us all and call it a day.