Let's talk about doge, but first let's talk about the late great David Foster Wallace, who 13 years ago wrote a classic essay about modern English* entitled "Tense Present," which, realistically, is better than anything I will ever write, so I should maybe just point you to it and end this post here.But I won't. Not least because I strongly suspect that if DFW had not taken his own life five years ago, he would already have updated "Tense Present" for the modern era. He almost would have had to.It is instructive that his essay includes the phrase You don't despite withering cultural pressure, have to use a computer, but you can't escape language. That may have been true, just, in 2001, but it is not true today. You cannot escape computers any more — and that fact has affected language in a way which is, if you ask me, nothing short of revolutionary.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, most people didn't write much, and even if they did, only a tiny handful of people might read the results. As a result, most of the words that people read were written by a tiny elite group of authors and journalists, and almost exclusively in an anodyne, pristine mode which DFW in his classic essay called SWE, for "Standard Written English."Also "Standard White English," but I'm not even going to go there, except to say again that you should read his essay.I'll go further and say that the overwhelming majority of widely-read nonfiction was written in an even smaller, strictly controlled subset of SWE – call it CSWE, for Clinical Standard Written English. Textbooks. Cookbooks. IRS instructions.
The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the British broadsheets, etc. All written in a similar mode: authoritative, declamatory, distant, dispassionate, impersonal, and allegedly neutral. Formal, pure, and precise.The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.