I’m finding that my language is deteriorating since I left the workforce. ‘ing’s’ have become ‘in’s’ or worse, ’em’s’, requested acknowledgements have devolved into ‘init’s’, assents into ‘yabetcha’s’. It’s a sad state of affairs.
Now though, on the upside, having been reading a bio of the consummate short story writer Flannery O’Connor I find that when she applied for appointment to the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a young woman in the 1940’s her interviewer asked her to please write her responses to his questions because he couldn’t understand her speech, modified as it was due to her secluded southern upbringing.
At the time, she was, of course, without the benefit of exposure to a strong, accent free media voice that everyone, nowadays, hears on a daily basis. Which leaves me without excuse; my deteriorating language use must be attributed to laziness. The thing is no one seems to mind. I suspect that my slovenly language use lowers expectations, my murder of enunciations and shorthand phrases are accepted, fit into what I sense is a collective disregard for proper enunciation.
This is not an uplifting perspective, I know, but I have nothing to prove, no one to impress and really mean no ill-will. I’ll stick with my written musings as my primary means of communication, though, at least partly out of embarrassment.
