what happened to language?

In the year 1914 a young girl named Monica Baldwin entered a convent, remaining secluded there until 1941 when she was released from her vows and returned to the outer world. In the intervening twenty-eight years wars and revolutions had come and gone in Europe, her uncle, Stanley Baldwin, had guided the destinies if his country for some time, technical developments had altered the conditions of everyday life almost beyond recognition. In 1949 Miss Baldwin published her impressions of those first bewildering years of her return to a world in which the motor-car had ousted the horse and carriage, and where respectable women showed their legs and painted their faces. Yet it was not only these odd sights that astounded her, for she was even more puzzled b what she heard. During a railway journey the term "luggage in advance" meant nothing to her, so in desperation she implored the porter to do as he thought best. Reading the daily newspapers made her feel idiotic in the extreme, because the writers of reviews and leading articles used words and phrases such as Jazz, the Unknown Soldier, lease-lend, Hollywood, Cocktail, Striptease and Isolationism. These and many others were quite incomprehensible to Miss Baldwin, who was equally bewildered when friends said "It's your funeral" or "Believe it or not". Advertisements on hoardings proclaimed the virtues of mysterious products named Vim, Rinso and Brasso, while in restaurants it was difficult to make any sense of the list of the dishes available.

This is a rare and valuable reminder to the rest of us that the English language does not stand still nay more than our other institutions. All language changes over a period of time, for reasons which are imperfectly understood. Or rather, since speech is really a form of human activity, like dancing or playing the piano----and not an entity in itself----it is more exact to say that each successive generation behaves linguistically in a slightly different manner from its predecessors. In his teens the young man in impatient of what he considers to be the unduly stilted vocabulary and pronunciation of his elders and he likes to show how up to date he is by the use of the latest slang. But as the years go by some of his slang becomes standard usage and in any case he slowly grows less receptive to linguistic novelties, so that by the time he reaches his forties he will probably be lamenting the slipshod speech of the younger generation, quite unaware that some of the expressions used in church and law-court were frowned upon by his own parents. In this respect language is a little like fashions in men's dress. The informal clothes of one generation become the everyday wear of the next, and just as young doctors and bank-clerk nowadays go about their business in sports-jackets, so they allow into their normal vocabulary various expressions which were once confined to slang and familiar conversation