I usually try not to be too pedantic about the "death of English" and stuff, because, like, you know, what language does is it evolves, so I'm like, you know, all about that. But today's good read asks what happened around 1985 or so when the linguistic virus called Vagueness infected our spoken language.
At long last, it dawned on me: Vagueness was not a campus fad or just another generational raid on proper locution. It was a coup. Linguistic rabble had stormed the grammar palace. The principles of effective speech had gone up in flames.
[. . .]
Is Vagueness simply an unexplainable descent into nonsense? Did Vagueness begin as an antidote to the demands of political correctness in the classroom, a way of sidestepping the danger of speaking forbidden ideas? Does Vagueness offer an undereducated generation a technique for camouflaging a lack of knowledge?
Between the juvenilization of the spoken language and the Twitterization of the written word, it's a wonder we can stil communicated.
