One of the typical BBC-style clever retorts to those who say that our language is not declining goes thus:

Languages evolve, as we all know. They have to. Duh.

English now is far removed from the language of Henry I. If technology and texting and the rest are causing English to mutate faster than before, so what? There are no absolutes here, and attempts to ‘stop the clock’ and deny evolution are doomed if not wrong in principle. Let it rip!

Well.

Market forces are one thing. Another is ‘evolution’.

What I object to is the idea that what we are seeing now is primarily down to either force.

Insofar as the standards of written and spoken English are changing (mainly in favour of greater simplification, inaccuracy and diminishing ability to express complex thoughts or indeed any accurately), that is down primarily to a state-dominated education system reducing the ‘cost’ of spelling/grammar errors in exams and therefore disincentivising teachers from imposing high standards.

Not to mention a frantic race to the British bottom as between different TV/radio media outlets, competing to see which can be the most disgustingly transgressive. With the BBC leading the charge with money extracted by a poll tax:

It’s hardly surprising that a coarsened world produces a coarsened culture, or even that the fruits of heavy-handed feminism and political correctness should be a nation of 12-year- old booze-sodden tarts and middle-aged blokes jerking off at BBC licence-payer expense…

But licence is not the same as liberty. And the British nanny state’s rearing of a generation of snarling, brutish, eternally arrested adolescents slumped in Hogarthian depravity seems not an unfortunate side effect but an all too foreseeable consequence. The BBC’s motto is “Nation shall speak peace unto nation.” Not in prime time. As David Cameron might say, nation shall speak pissed unto nation.

It has taken several decades for the results of this to be overwhelmingly clear. But they are now. A Tsunami of Incompetence and Inaccuracy is now sweeping through our public life.

So the collapse of language and standards are indeed by some chance related.

This is not Evolution or Market Forces, any more than the introduction into the atmosphere of virulent plague virus as genetically modified in a government laboratory is evolution or market forces.

It’s a direct consequence of state-sponsored linguicide, not perhaps in the ‘deliberate’ category of murder as such – rather more like manslaughter, where stupid/reckless behaviour leads to someone’s death.

The state blunders around like a dotty doctor, trying one madcap scheme after another as the patient expires.

"When everything is a strategic priority, nothing is."

And, since we have all voted and not risen up en masse to thwart these awful processes but instead sit there sniggering at filthy, unworthy late-night TV and wallowing in our own squalour, we the masses are implicated in them too.

So, it looks like a unique case: State-assisted Suilinguicide.

Too tragic for words?

Not (yet) quite.

Try this marvellous essay by Charles Krauthammer: Decline is a Choice.