Language Evolution

Evolution is a widely accepted theory. It just plain makes sense. What is less accepted is everything is evolving. Langauge is one of the things we can watch evolve with the passage of time. My friend Alan and I discuss it often. What follows is a little bit of what we think.

Suppose a culture is an animal. Or rather, a colony of animals. Let's, for argument's sake, call these animals - these beasts - human.
Society works actively to stay healthy. If it doesn't, it stagnates, like a body of water, with all of the bad continuing to breed and pollute. Language is the movement of that water. In an effort to keep society running we place individuals who are intelligent through an education process we know as Universty. This is both a good and a bad thing. Intelligent individuals are brought together with likeminded peers and given the knowledge of those that went before them.
The bad side of this is apparent on any mailing list when an outsider asks a perfectly reasonable question. "What does so and so mean?" gets a lengthy, boring answer filled with the learned notes of devotees to the topic clouded in the mess of semantics and made up words.
Dangerous thought is so clouded that it is only very rarely (or in marketing) you actually convey what you mean to say. Or hear it. Don't believe it? Ask an "expert" to explain what they are doing in their field of expertise. See how much you take in on the first pass.
Words get made up all the time. Don't believe me, why don't you Google it? That's a brand name. It's now also a verb (to google), an object (saw it on Google), and a company. The trouble with this is at one end of the spectrum, it's so heady with the raw use of language we can barely understand one another. It's a splintered group setup - everyone talking their own language and thus isolated.

Made up words sometimes escape. Or are released in a controlled fashion (aka marketing). Or are just landed on the unsuspecting middle class masses who don't have a clue (think any George W. Bush speech). There used to be a warning label in written text for this. [sic]. I'm jumpingly [sic] good. You can guess I mean I'm so happy I wish to jump about. You also know it's not a real word, but I've intentionally said it, because I mean it.
This great unsuspecting middleclass is nature itself at work. It's a massive testbed of language, which mirrors the software development lifestyle greatly. Words are introduced, usually from the intellectual braintrusts of society. They get thrown about, misused, meanings change - and, if a word isn't unsuitable, accepted into common use. The words that die, that lose life or meaning don't stay dead - it may just not have been their time. They are fed back to the intellectual mime artists as fodder, with notes on why it failed. Sadly, words are often dead as others have usurped them by the time anyone realises no one uses them.

Finally, with have a third tier of society. The poor and the needy who couldn't give a stuff about language. These aren't necessarily materially poor individuals - more intellectually. They invent their own language too - pidgeon. They don't write no good, but so long as they can eat they don't care.
Sadly this is much to their ill fortune. They can't obtain much of what they want in society as they are misunderstood - their poor command of language is a stigma.
SMS technology can be blamed for this. While this process has always existed, the advent of cheap SMS technology combined with poor interfaces leads to a horrible crippling of language. Then, those that only know SMS "Engrish" (as I am want to call it) venture out onto the greater part of the internet. And are astounded when their peers don't understand them.
Poor choices are the only ones left. And these then backfire miserably. Quite a lot.

These individuals end up becoming splintered off into small isolated groups unable to communicate with the rest of society. Alan, who is more paranoid than I am, believes this to be an orchestrated movement - cut off the dangerous elements of society who color outside of the lines, isolate them with words and meaning. I'm not so sure it's not a naturally occuring thing.

Related Reads

Degredation of the English Language - Such a pretty blog too.

An interesting read, which I know about but didn't know the name of (this very process in action, heh) is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Let me know what you think :)