I know, I know. Egypt is a big deal so I need to share my thoughts with you on it.

But even though it’s only February 2011 we already have the winner for the Article of the Decade.

It’s this one, by Clark Whelton, former speechwriter for New York City mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani, which looks into the dark heart of the collapse of American English (although most of what he says applies over here too).

It starts briskly:

I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ”

She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.

Back in the mid-1980s he tries to hire speechwriting interns and finds that, amazingly, more and more candidates can not speak or write coherently:

I was baffled by what seemed to be a reversion to the idioms of childhood. And yet intern candidates were not hesitant or uncomfortable about speaking elementary school dialects in a college-level job interview. I engaged them in conversation and gradually realized that they saw Vagueness not as slang but as mainstream English.

At long last, it dawned on me: Vagueness was not a campus fad or just another generational raid on proper locution. It was a coup. Linguistic rabble had stormed the grammar palace. The principles of effective speech had gone up in flames.

In 1988, my elder daughter graduated from Vassar. During a commencement reception, I asked one of her professors if he’d noticed any change in Vassar students’ language skills. “The biggest difference,” he replied, “is that by the time today’s students arrive on campus, they’ve been juvenilized. You can hear it in the way they talk. There seems to be a reduced capacity for abstract thought.”

He went on to say that immature speech patterns used to be drummed out of kids in ninth grade. “Today, whatever way kids communicate seems to be fine with their high school teachers.”

Read the whole thing.

Then listen to the language of middle-class ten-year old girls in deepest Oxfordshire. The epidemic of ‘like’ as a meaningless qualifier for almost every other phrase – as part of a wider retreat from intelligent linguistic precision in favour of silly noises and gestures – is in full swing here too, and has been for a while.

What happened? Obvious.

By the mid-1980s the first full wave of smug, airhead-stoner graduates from the 1960s was achieving (un)critical mass in the US education system. Discipline, accuracy, attention to detail – all that was now officially uncool. Self-expression was all that counted, regardless of the inability of children to express anything noteworthy.

And never, ever must any child be told off for being inarticulate – like, that would be judgmental, man.

The long-term results of this tsunami of leftist ideological uselessness washing through our civilisation are incalculably awful. As standards of teachers than pupils then teachers fall away, expectations and outcomes are dumbed down and down. The Economist last month on English schools:

Yet only 16% pass their five exams in the subjects once considered essential: a science, a language and a humanity, in addition to English and maths. The rest pass vocational subjects—not surprising, perhaps, when according to the official exchange rate a GCSE in applied physical education is equivalent to one in Latin, and a vocational qualification in beauty therapy worth as much as a good pass at GCSE physics.

A second reason for the low take-up of academic subjects is the declining popularity of modern languages, which were compulsory for 14-16-year-olds until 2004, but are no longer part of the national curriculum for that age group. In 2002, 76% of pupils were entered for French, German or Spanish. By 2010, that figure had fallen to 43%.

I have wailed previously about all this, calling the phenomenon Suilinguicide:

There is an expression for the death of a language: Linguicide.

See also Ethnocide:

… ethnocide could refer to actions which do not lead directly to death or harm of living members of a group, but instead have the long-term effect of reducing birthrates, interfering with education or transmission of culture to future generations of a group, or erasing the group’s existence or practices from the historical record.

This usage is commonly found in discussions of oppressed indigenous peoples and is sometimes referred to as culturecide.

Does not the highlighted expression sum up rather well the officially driven disintegration of the English language seen now over several decades – and in which the English people themselves and their institutions seem to be complicit?

Over in Paris at the ICC’s wonderful international mediation competition (held in English) I saw students from all over the world delivering superb presentations on complex legal issues in good English. Including one remarkable young Chinese man from a remote part of China who not only was able to argue his legal case in respectable English, but also spoke several other European languages as well.

Imagine the sheer hard work of achieving that.

And then look again at those GCSE results: only 16% of our children are getting a puny five GCSEs in subjects requiring something like a serious ability to express oneself, with language learning falling fast away across the board thanks to Labour’s education policies.

What a betrayal of the other 84%. Who, of course, are on their way to becoming the cheated, resentful vast majority of the population.