The Idiocracy of American Language
When I went to college, there was never any doubt in my mind what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. When I graduated from college with a Journalism degree, I got my dream job at a daily newspaper in a major city.
While I was still in school, my older sister (who was a book editor), sent me a humongous dictionary that weighed about 25 lbs. Carrying it around was an impossibility, it was the kind of dictionary you see perched on a pedestal in old movies. But I used it religiously, and it helped me through college at a time when we didn’t have spellcheck and dictionary.com. After she sent it to me, she told me something I’ll never forget. She said “The English language has more words than any other world language.” She said this to me many decades ago, and ever since that time, I’ve been puzzled by the propensity for Americans to constantly invent more words and add them to an already overly wordy language.
We have plenty of words if you want to express yourself. There’s no shortage of anything in American English.
So why do people keep making up new words? The answer is simple: they don’t take the time to learn the words that are already universally accepted by language scholars. It’s easier to just make up your own babble, and now with the idiocy of social media, if you’re stupidity catches on, then some moron at Merriam Webster puts it in the new edition so they aren’t viewed as “old school.” George Bush’s famous butchering of the word nuclear (noo-kyuh-luhr) actually made it in to modern dictionaries as a variant. WTF??? Really, you’re going to reward stupidity by making it acceptable speech??
In the comedy “Idiocracy”, a bewildered Luke Wilson is transported 500 years into the future due to a cryogenic accident by the government. In the beginning of the movie, a narrator lays out the thesis that humans actually get much dumber into the future because the ignorant folk are procreating at a much higher rate than the educated people. Even though this premise is posed as comedy, I believe it’s completely true, and the future of the human race will only get bleaker as the ignorant and uneducated take a bigger place in our society. Luke’s first challenge in the year 2550 is to communicate with the local inhabitants he encounters. The narrator says this, “But the English language had deteriorated into a hybrid of hillbilly, valley girl, inner city slang and various grunts.”
If you watch the movie and are paying close attention, you should realize this is already happening today, as our language is already being bastardized by the expanding number of imbeciles. If you say “obvi” or “ridic” to me, I’m liable to punch you in the face just on principle. You mean to tell me that you’re so wrapped up in your phone on Facebook and Twitter, you can’t take the time to enunciate the words “obvious” or “ridiculous”?? You’ve got to be kidding. Ignorance is rampant, education is more and more obsolete. Director Mike Judge is a genius.
I wish I had an answer to this ridiculous trend, but trust me, it’s only going to get worse. In the movie, Luke Wilson is constantly called a “fag” by everyone in the future, because they can’t understand him as he’s speaking in a normal, everyday speech pattern where he’s actually enunciating all the syllables. To the dwindling minority of educated people who actually know our language and speak it consistently every day, this is your future.
So the next time people say things like “vacay” or “adorbs” to you, please correct them and say, “Do you mean vacation, or adorable?” Your future grandchildren will thank you for it.
