Lipsticking the gilded language pig
Language changes through use and misuse. I’m no linguistic expert so I offer no opinion on whether the English language has got better or worse over the last 100 years in its precision and richness. But it surely can’t be a good thing when commentators on the telly (a useful addition to the language, I think) say “come” when they mean “came”. My mum, bless her heart, always used to be “coming” when she should have been “caming”. But then she had no pretensions to be a public broadcaster. Having also visited Lithgow on numbers of occasions in recent years, I can attest that “came” was seldom used, at least in the company I kept.
The adverb too has largely disappeared from sports broadcasts. Players these days run “quick”. Again, personally, I don’t think this represents an improvement to (or is it “in”?) the language.
The frequent use of “oxymoron” annoys me. It’s constantly misused when the speaker simply means “a contradiction in terms” but wants to appear sophisticated. How…
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