Frankly Speaking

The following is a ruminative rant, so ignore it if you like.

I have stated before that I find great happiness in a library.  The mixture of contentment and exhilaration I experience there, has to do with the availability of so much recorded thought spanning so many years, and also the most palpable example of true communal sharing that has ever been, the sharing of those thoughts by other readers who got to that piece of the font before I did.
So that is established: I love to read, for knowledge and to connect with the body of humanity.  Does it shock you, then, if I say that I never look for either in the bookstores?  I have my reasons, and never fear - I will lay them all out in detail.

At some point in all of our cultural "progress," literature was modernized along with everything else, and now what keeps the bookstores open and in business is the peddling of sensational tell-alls, celebrity memoirs which strip away all veneer of class we thought these people must have, romantic novels set in the present day to encourage us to pine after a fairy tale without the underlying, meaningful, sermons in the Grimm's and Andersen's classics.  Books hawking particular diet methods outnumber those that offer old-fashioned, natural medicine and goodsense living.  Perhaps what irks me most of all are attempts to update and repackage classics, an insult to the genius of writers and evidence of an assumption that readers of today haven't the capacity to understand a work that uses a variety of real English.

I hate it that my language is being lost.  English usage is dying an agonizing death.  It began long years before text-speak, actually.  It must have started with the advent of slang. I fight this battle nearly every day, with my own children, who ought to know better, or at least to pretend, by now:  "But why does it matter how I said it, if you know what I'm trying to say?"  And I cannot help myself; I must square my shoulders, draw considerable breath, and launch into my defense.  "If it doesn't matter how you speak your thought, then it doesn't matter what you thought, and next, it won't matter even to think, and finally, there will be no more thought."  The poor things look at me cross-eyed, marvelling at how I could dig all that out of their using an object pronoun for a subject. 
The order established in the way a language works is necessary.  A standard is not just an ideal, it is a practical defense against chaos.  As nearly as we can ascertain, the language of the ancient Akkadians contained no differentiation of tenses or moods or voices in its verbs.  In other words, each verb had only one single form, and without context, it was impossible to know whether present, past, or future action is being described, whether perfected or ongoing action.  Is it any wonder that the language did not survive the rise of the next dominant civilization?  At the other extreme, when ancient Greece was absorbed by ancient Rome, their conquerors consciously modelled their Latin after the Greek, which was so expressive of myriad shades of meaning.  Greek, the language of the ruled, became the language of the educated rulers because its excellence and efficacy were obvious, and appreciated.  Latin eventually gained this type of prestige in the colonies Rome established, and remained long after they were dissolved and reinvented as European kingdoms. 
It was a near escape, some  years back, when there was talk of teaching disadvantaged, minority students "ebonics", which would have amounted to the most insidious form of linguistic racism ever perpetrated.  But a similar travesty has crept in anyway, and among the whole, integrated population of the West, in the forms of textspeak and reality-tv-ese, which is a barely-recognizeable version of common English that utilizes "*beep*" where three out of every five real words should be. 
I love how author Michael Shaara explained in the foreward to one of his Civil War novels, that in that age, "Men spoke in windier phrases" than they do now.  Indeed, when you read writings from that time, it takes longer to read them, and not just because they are more profusely worded, but because the sentences are precisely crafted.  Prepositions do not end sentences, nor do conjunctions begin them.  Curses are not regular vocabulary.  Even hyperbole is more believeable, crafted with such dignity.  To speak and to write as they did then, indicates that people thought deeply, they pondered, what they ought to say, and others listened just as attentively.  In our day, everyone is about the quickest, shortest way to get to the point so they can get on to the next thing, and there are always a dozen questions needed to clarify what was supposed to have been an efficient communication.  Is this striking any chords, or am I completely alone in this understanding? 
If I am to be alone, the last linguist, well,...at least I have well-squared shoulders.