Words, words, words: the lost philological battles
Writers love their words. Most of them also like them to come approximately in the right order, in the right tense and so forth. Typically, parents chide their children for colourful neologisms and ungrammatical constructions, and teachers do the same with young pupils. Rightly so, I think. What is easily forgotten is that language wasn't given to Webster on stone tablets, forever unchangable, but it's a living thing, and it changes constantly. No matter how much we are in awe of Shakespeare's English, his language is not ours.
There are laws for the development of languages. Spoken language is dictated by the shape of our mouths; how our tongue, palate and teeth combine with air from our lungs to form sounds. Some combinations are naturally cumbersome to utter, and there is a strong tendency to simplify over time. I guess once upon a time they pronounced 'women' as it is spelled; over time people found it easier to say 'wimin.' The written language stands as a monument over language once spoken, slowly moving along after the oral form, always a century or more behind. The older generation and the written language is a brake, slowing down the evolution of new language forms. For many people, authoritative writings give the supposedly 'correct answer,' telling us how it's supposed to be, instead of the other way around. The written language is, after all, based on the spoken.
Thus, we just have to face that some of the forms that makes the pedants among us cringe will one day be taught in schools. I hope we will never see 'irregardless' accepted as a proper word, but the trend may well be there already.
The little apostrophe continues to confuse. I wonder if one day the power that be will give up and declare it's acceptable to write 'PC's' when you mean "PCs" plural. Surely, I rest assured that the distinction between its and it's will continue to pose endless problems for foreign students of English and natives alike.
And words change their meanings, too. Sometimes a word is hijacked, which may well lead a modern reader to be confused about what Nietzsche's The Gay Science is about. The same is true about words applied in politics. Somehow the word liberal has stuck to the political left in American English. In the rest of the world, it refers to a rightist! A lost battle. You just have to accept that the label has stuck, even though the word is misleading. And what about the monstrosity 'paedophile' (American 'pedophile') which should refer to someone who loves children? Another lost battle.
The etymology of a word does not dictate its meaning. Neither does dictionaries, which are meant to document usage, not force it. It is, for bad and good, the meaning attributed to words in society that dictates their meaning. The writer must take his or her audience into account, and use language in a way that is understood. So, like the written forms, the lingusitically conservative among us just have to walk along, reluctantly, somewhere behind the vanguard of change.
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