Language tends to deteriate dramasticly.

Johnson, the guy who compiled that famous early dictionary of English, once said

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay,

There seems to be a value judgement their against the natural processes of language change, but it strikes me as far less clear than others make out.

Is he talking about how language change in general? Was he lamenting the loss of conservative feature such as "thee"/"thou" and subjunctive conjugations?

Or was he talking about loss of precision in language, such as the change in meaning of "decimation" from "killing one tenth" via "massacre" to more general "destruction".

Either way, language does most definitely change, and the two words in the title that your spellchecker probably would say aren't words at all are good examples that I hear with reasonable frequency in my own life.

I don't know how many of you will have worked out there meanings and/or origins from reading them, but please leave a comment to let me know.

Deteriate

Of the two, this is the one I hear most often; from my own mouth, from the mouths of friends, and often even on TV. You probably hear it too. It's simply a contraction of "deteriorate". It occurs in the derived noun too: "deteriation".

The loss of a vowel in the middle of a sentence is what we call "syncope". Syncope is particularly common where a vowel is sandwiched between two instances of the same consonant. Here, it's the repeated R that triggers the lost syllable.

A more topical example of the same mechanism is the word "quantitative", as in "quantitative easing". Listen to the news, and most reporters will pronounce it fully. In an unscripted interview, though, you may just hear "quantative". Discuss the economy in a bar, and after a couple of glasses, you'll all be saying it that way. Even that form still has two Ts, so one day it might just shrink to "quantive".

What's interesting about "deteriate", though is the /i/ sound. We haven't lost the "io" from deteriorate, and just had the Rs collide, we've lost the "or". Hmmm...

Dramasticly

(Or possibly "dramastically".) This is something I'm not aware of hearing that much. I associate it particularly with my little sister (although I'm aware that several of us in the family have said it), and a few months ago I heard it in the pub in my parents' village, so maybe it's a local thing. I'll keep my ears open.

This work is a confusion between "dramatically" and "drastically", and I was always conscious of that fact. But that doesn't mean it's not a legitimate word. We have a lot of evidence of words "falling together" in multiple languages.

For example, the conjugations of the verb "to go" in Spanish, French and Italian are a mixture of three verbs in Latin: andare, ire and vadere. But now they're just one word.

A far more recent example of falling together is the term "nailed it".

Most of us would associate that with getting something right/doing it perfectly. In that sense, it derives from the phrase "to hit the nail on the head" and evolved from saying the perfect answer to doing something really well, like "nailing" a jump at a skate park.

On the other hand, we have the management version, where "nailing" something is just getting it finished. It probably derives from the phrase "to nail ((something)) to the wall". That's pretty much the opposite meaning, because that phrase is all about not doing things perfectly. The metaphor is a kitchen cabinet -- you don't care if the door is slightly squint, you just want it on the wall so that the job's finished and everyone can go home.

Both of these long proverbial forms have reduced to the same verb, which can cause misunderstandings.

This sort of change isn't uncommon, though, so you should always be careful about discounting any theory about the origin of a term because of some other theory. It could turn out that both are right....

The Names.... language change in action.

I just read an article on the BBC website about the use of the definite article in the name Ukraine/The Ukraine.

It was quite interesting and raised several interesting points.  (Although it listed a lot of "the" places that have recently lost the article in common speech.)

One thing that did bug me, though, was a little S-shaped oversight, because they completely missed the point that all explicitly plural proper nouns need "the".  "The Netherlands", "The Phillipines", "The Bahamas".

Consider how you would refer to someone by his surname only... for example the western Alias Smith and Jones.  Now if you want to use the family name in the plural, you need the definite article, eg. "keeping up with the Joneses".
The argument in the article about the fact that "the Netherlands" is made up of readily-understandable elements doesn't really hold up; there are many English-language placenames in the UK that are made of generic elements but don't take the article, like the multiple places called "Bridgend", places like "Holyhead".  The archetype, though, has to be "Land's End".   It is the single most meaningful placename in the whole of the archipelago -- it's iconic and valuable because of its meaning is abundantly clear.  Yet we do not use the article.  We used to, certainly (see the Wikipedia entry for Land's End for evidence).  The historical origins are interesting, definitely, and certain classes of placenames do preserve old patterns, but language change is a subtle beast, and sometimes it isn't the form that changes, but the reasons speakers have internally for using that form.

Also, looking at the Bahamas and the Phillipines, it should also be noted that historically we didn't always name island groups in the plural, particularly in Scotland.  Conservative natives of Uist, Orkney and Shetland will still refer to their homes as such, whether outsiders are likely to call them the Uists, the Orkneys and the Shetlands.  (I would personally be very surprised if the English kings bent on conquering Scotland and Ireland said they wanted complete control of "the Britains" rather than simply "Britain", because this looks like a pretty new feature to me, and I suspect that it may be to do with the borrowing of French and Spanish names for new island groups in colonial times.)

The modern speaker of a modern language has no internal knowledge of the language change -- if a language encoded all its history, languages would be so "big" that they would be impossible to learn.  Instead, every generation observes what the generation before says and tries to work out for themselves why they say it.

Now I know someone's going to mention shops and companies as a counter-example, because the supermarket chain is Morrisons, but that's actually a possessive. It's Morrison's supermarket, after all. Heck, when I was a child, I used to append 's to practically every single-word shop name, as did my parents. Tesco's, Bejam's, M&M's, etc. Somehow Comet got an exception, and Fine Fayre was left as-is because it was two words.  Oh, and look at that: a two word generic with no definite article -- another disproof of the BBC's claim.

But you're right that Morrisons has no apostrophe these days, and neither does Greggs.  This is another example of language change, because as more and more shops drop the apostrophe in order to have their brand match their website domain name (Sainsbury's are a rare case of defiance -- how long that'll last now that the Sainsbury family aren't the main shareholders is anyone's guess), and as we get more exposed to Tesco as the official name rather than Tesco's, the next generation will grow up without the cues that it's a possessive name, and even though I will hear "Greggs" as "Gregg's", they won't -- in fact, it's entirely possible that everyone under 16 already doesn't recognise it as a possessive form... and yet we speak the "same" language.

When that generation reaches their thirties and are editing and delivering our daily news, then things might change, because a generation that is entirely comfortable and happy with S at the end of their proper nouns will happily say "Netherlands" instead of "the Netherlands".

The nature of electronic communications

Electronic communication has changed human interaction in some very obvious ways - email seems to take the best of mail and phone calls and merge them into one, for example.  However, with the increased ease in communication, we're communicating a lot more, both in terms of number of messages passed and the patterns of these messages.  In times gone by (before I entered the workforce), your main source of message from outside your team was the office post trolley.

Once or twice a day, your messages would be delivered, and you would dedicate a chunk of time to prioritising, reading and replying.  But now those messages appear in your inboxes throughout the day, interrupting what we're doing and making us feel guilty if we don't reply immediately.

The result is that we train ourselves to deal with communication quickly, and we devote little concentration to each individual message.

In the corporate world, there's a working rule: if you need the answer to a question, make it the only question in an email.  All the evidence shows that people read emails up until the first actionable point and deal with that -- your first question should always get answered, but your second probably won't.  We still talk about the positivity/negativity sandwich -- that old idea of putting the negative feedback between two positive things, so that it doesn't demoralise or antagonise the recipient unnecesarily.

But the observations from email are clear: the first part of the message is the only thing the recipient is guaranteed to read, so we have to go straight to the negative.

The problem here, though, is the terminology.  In a performance review, "positive" is good and "negative" is bad.  That's fine.  But outside of a formally structured environment, "positive" really means "agreement" and "negative" means "disagreement".

If you look at web forums, you'll find that you can categorise many of them into two categories: "friendly" and "robust debate".  Even if the forum in particular can't be categorised this way, the users will be split across the two camps.

One of the characteristics of the "friendly" camp is the positive/negative sandwich.  Everyone prides themselves on supporting people, even when they disagree with them.  But look a little closer and you'll see that everyone starts missing the disagreements, because they're hidden in the middle of the message.  With everyone discussing why they agree, there's no scope to resolve the disagreements -- the disagreements aren't even recognised.  The two or more parties leave the discussion with exactly the same views as they entered it.

The "robust debate" camp eschews the politesse and goes straight to the disagreements.  You get genuine debate and you come out of it changed -- even if your personal opinion remains the same, you have a much clearer idea of the questions involved.  It's really only once you have these questions in your head that you can start to notice that sometimes your wrong.

And that's why I'll always be in the "robust debate" camp.  There's been plenty of debates which I've left convinced I'm right, but months or even years later, it has dawned on me that I'm wrong.  Knowledge isn't just about what you believe to be true, you need to know about what you believe to be false, or you will never be able to honestly evaluate your beliefs.

So if I seem short with you on your blog or forum, it's not an attack on you or anyone else, it's because I want to expand my knowledge.  It shows I've got a genuine interest in what you're trying to say.

And if I'm nice to you online, feel free to feel patronised.

Counterintuitive, perhaps, but sometimes it's easier to start with the harder material...

In general, whenever we teach or learn something new, we start with the easy stuff then build on to the more difficult stuff.  But this isn't always a good idea, because sometimes the easy stuff causes us to be stuck in a "good enough" situation.

When I started learning the harmonica, I learned to play with a "pucker technique", ie I covered the wholes with my lips.  The alternative technique of "tongue blocking" (self descriptive, really), was just "too" difficult for me as a learner.  So for a long, long time, the pucker was "good enough" and tongue blocking was too difficult for not enough reward.  It limited my technique for a good number of years, and now that I can do it, I wish I'd learnt it years ago.

The same block of effort vs reward happens in all spheres of learning.  If you learn something easy, but of limited utility, it's far too easy to just continue along doing the same old thing, and it's far too difficult to learn something new, so you stagnate.  Harmonicas, singing, swimming, skiing, mathematics, computer programming; there's always the temptation to just hack about with what you've got rather than learn a new and appropriate technique.

This problem, unsurprisingly, rears its ugly head all too often in language learning, but with language it has an altogether insidious form: the "like your native language" form.  If you've got a choice of forms, one is going to be more like your native language than the other, and this is therefore easier to learn.  Obviously, this form is going to be "good enough", and the immediate reward to the learner for learning the more difficult form (ie different from the native language) isn't enough to justify the effort.  However, in the long term, the learner who seeks mastery is going to need that form in order to understand language encountered in the real world.

The problem gets worse, though, when you're talking about dialectal forms.

Here's an example.  Continuous tenses in the Celtic languages traditionally use a noun as the head verbal element (known as the verbal noun or verb-noun).  I am at creation [of] blog post, as it were.  Because it's a noun, the concept of a "direct object" is quite alien, and instead genitives are used to tie the "object" to the verbal noun.  In the case of object pronouns, they use possessives.  I am at its creation instead of *I am at creation [of] it.  Note that the object therefore switches sides from after to before the verbal noun.

Now in Welsh, the verbal noun has become identical to the verb root, and is losing its identity as a noun.  This has led to a duplication of the object pronoun, once as a possessive, once as a plain pronoun -- effectively I am in its creation [of] it.  This really isn't a stable state, as very few languages would tolerate this sort of redundancy, and the likely end-state is that the possessive gets lost, and the more English-like form (I am in creation [of] it) will win out.  In fact, there are many speakers who already talk this way.

But for the learner, learning this newer form at the beginning is a false efficiency.  There are plenty of places where the old form is still current, so unless the learner knows for certain that they'll be spending their time in an area with the newer form, they're going to need the conservative form anyway.  To a learner who knows the conservative form, adapting to the newer form is trivially easy, but for someone who knows only the newer form, the conservative form is really quite difficult to grasp.

So teaching simple forms early risks restricting the learner's long-term potential.  So while you want to make life simple for yourself or you students, make sure you're not doing them or yourself a disservice.

Link drop: how technology is changing language

A very well-written article with a lot of material from David Crystal about the effects technology is having on language and literacy at: http://www.silicon.com/technology/software/2011/11/21/from-lolcat-to-textspeak-how-technology-is-shaping-our-language-39747927/print/

An example of language change: Genealogy.

Genealogy has always been moderately popular as a hobby, but in recent years it has become all the rage, thanks to TV programmes like the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are? which shows celebrities and public figures tracing their family trees (and often crossing continents in the process).

Now, I had always thought the word was geneology, but the BBC and various websites disabused me of this notion.  But just the other day, one of the other students here mentioned that her dad was working on the family tree... and she said "geneology".

Let's have a look at the etymology of the word.

According to Etymonline, genealogy comes from the Greek "genea" (generation, descent), + "logia", (to speak about).  So originally -logy was about lecturers, and over time was generalised to experts, and hence knowledge.

Unfortunately, the English-speaking brain doesn't understand declension of nouns, so it sees the first morpheme as "gene", not "genea", and expects the "alogy" bit to be a single morpheme.  As most "-logy" words are "ologies" (biology, radiology, geology etc), we have generalised all -logies to -ologies.  (Even though Etymonline has the suffix entry as "-logy".)

Don't believe me?  Consider this famous advert from the 1980s:

If the English-speaking brain recognised the original morpheme boundary, would they have scripted it as "ology"?  And would we have understood as easily?  The popularity of the advert (it was a widely-used pop-culture reference for years after it stopped showing) suggests it's natural English.

Given all that, I can only conclude that the word is, to all intents and purposes "geneology", and that attempts to preserve the A are misguided.

Let English be English and let Greek be Greek.