Time May Change Me, But I Can't Change Time

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Recommended: The impact of technology on the English language

Language changes; it grows and adapts similarly to the way that humans grow and adapt to the dynamic world surrounding us. From Old English with epic poems like Beowulf to Middle English in The Canterbury Tales, it progressed into Shakespearean, or Early Modern English, which eventually manifested into the incredibly complex language we refer to as Modern English. The journey English embarked on many centuries ago by expanding its territory to America has emerged through "borrowing" pieces of assorted languages, including, but not limited to Latin, French, German, Native American, Celtic, and Greek. Cultural integration has caused and will continue to cause the English language to gradually expand its linguistic repertoire, so it is interesting that an astoundingly intelligent professor and writer such as David Foster Wallace, in his essay Authority and American Usage, can make a claim to prescriptivism: a belief that writing while using traditional grammar and proper usage of English is unanimously superior to the way that modern Americans use it. While this approach does make him look educated, isn't language an expression of human personality? Personalities—like language, changes over time; for starters, you are not the same elementary school child you once were. Judith Butler, the author of Besides Oneself, reveals her liberal stance on the "prescriptivism versus descriptivism" language debate that is revealed in her unique, long-winded sentence. The English language lacks an official language academy, yet there is a massive number of English speakers worldwide. Without this central authority, the realm of the English language is basically a free-for-all (i.e. inconsistent dictionaries), so it's impractical to say that th...

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...ays changing, it is only natural to associate language with the same changes.
By seeing past the constricting lens of Prescriptivism, we can reevaluate our opinions on language. In doing so, we can unravel how we are weighed down by the thoughts of what is considered "traditional" instead of embracing the changes and using language to our advantage. I found it to be evident that Judith Butler was on the descriptivism side of things, which accomodates the changes that the world inflicts on language, whereas David Foster Wallace creates an unneccessary conflict by pushing his Prescriptivist beliefs onto his readership. However, this means that I stray from wanting what is conventionally correct. The bottom line is that language, along with technology, economics, and culture, is constantly changing, and we can either choose to complain about it, or embrace the change.

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