Words are beautiful. From a young age, I found myself an avid reader with a strong vocabulary, and that passion has lasted my entire life. Today, I am stunned at how much information we can access, and it’s all because we have a language, both oral and written, that contains agreed-upon meanings, spellings, grammar, and punctuation. We are capable of taking our most abstract thoughts and sharing them clearly with others, an act that no other species has mastered to remotely near the level we have attained.
Now, I accept that people are going to make alterations to language. I’m no linguistic historian, but I assume that language has always shifted shape to accommodate common conventions, slang, and the like. It disgusts me that D’oh is in the dictionary, but I’m clearly not Noah bloody Webster (or Nelly American Heritage for that matter) so I don’t get a say in the process. And I also know that when I was a kid-through-teen, I had all kinds of ridiculous words flop eerily from my lips, a part of some attempt to be cool and use the common lingo.
