Language 24th August 2010.

Like most people of a certain age, I have a set routine in the morning; mine involves a coffee over the morning paper. Two articles this morning set off a train of thought involving language, and the way a language drifts over time. New words are constantly appearing and old ones are falling into disuse.

Now journalists are always coining news words as a way of “spicing” up their articles and this particular one used two words, one I’d come across in context several times before and one that was deliberate gibberish.

Since the credit crunch it would appear that we Brits (ed: there’s another newish word!) aren’t taking as many fly away holidays as we used to, we’re tending to stay at home for our holidays – hence the genesis of the first of these new words – staycation. Literally a truncation of “stay at home vacation”. It’s not actually a literal truth – people are not staying at home, but they’re not leaving the country. I suspect this one might make it into the dictionary before long – although at the moment Word doesn’t recognise it as a word.

The second one was pure gibberish, a humorous corruption of staycation to cover the fact it has rained a lot over the last week – “splashcation” – for those who had the misfortune to get rained on while on holiday.

The other article, a couple of pages further into the paper bemoaned the way the English language is changing so that people couldn’t read and understand, and yes she used the word, access, Shakespeare anymore.

I just about fell off my chair laughing at this pretentious piece of nonsense. That is, of course, entirely what it is, pretentious twaddle (ed: old word alert!).
Shakespeare didn’t write in mid-twentieth century English after all. I very much doubt you personally know many people who could accurately read Shakespeare as it was originally written, I certainly couldn’t do so, and I don’t think I know more than one person who could. (My cousin is an archivist who specialises in Old English for the Cambridge University.)

Language is a living, breathing entity in its own right. It changes over time, sometimes with extraordinary speed – especially as it tries to keep up with scientific and social change. Let’s face it the last century and the start of this have seen a faster rate of change in both than ever before, and this trend looks likely to continue.

So if you need one of your characters to invent a word to describe something in dialogue, why not? You never know, one day it might appear in the dictionary.

After all someone invented a complete language called Klingon didn’t they?