[geeks] New Tech Schools: Digital Harbor in Baltimore

[Mike Meredith]

On Fri, 13 Apr 2007 17:08:51 -0400 (EDT), Sandwich Maker wrote:
> it does bother me when the unwashed invent a new way to say something
> there's already a word for, just because they don't know it.  the
> whole concept behind a common language is that we all have the -same-
> words for things!

Or misuse words like "logon"/"login". Not much we can do about it
though. Other languages have tried the formal language academy approach
to determine what their language should be like, which in the long run
doesn't seem to work out that well.

> and what about 'free willie'?  bit of a clanger, what?	;^>

Well that one's a bit juvenile to have much of an effect. Although
given the audience for that film was mostly juvenile perhaps *they*
found it amusing.

> i'd be more worried about american and british drifting too far apart.
> american english is drifting into regional dialects, and as far as i'm
> concerned it mostly just makes life more interesting, but if it goes
> too far...  and didn't britain have some 50-odd english dialects as
> late as 1950?

Yes, but they were rapidly dying at that time. Today you are not likely
to encounter anyone speaking dialect except for a few words
unintelligible to outsiders.

We do still have many very different accents though which can be pretty
obscure if you are not used to them (the Glaswegian accent is an
excellent example of this). However there is something that has been
noticed in particular with people with call centre jobs ... people who
are talking with non-locals tend to tone down their accents to make
them more understandable.

My mum has the opposite effect ... I can instantly hear when she's been
talking to her mum because her childhood Lancashire accent comes out
clear and strong.

I suspect the effect of media will ensure that we remain able to
communicate although when we're speaking to the local butcher, the
conversation may not be understandable to outsiders. Teenagers of
course do this a lot by inventing new words to irritate adults,
although if they use these new words when talking to adults they're
deliberately trying to exclude because they can speak normal English
perfectly well.

-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
  'I find film very seductive ... like a woman my parents would not
like me to date. She's expensive, inconvenient, and you really can't
know you'll get what you want. But you'll be certain you'll want a
cigarette before the night is out.