I write to you about a grave concern facing our society today, which I believe has not been getting the coverage it deserves. I understand that you have been preoccupied by the intricacies of the Syrian conflict, and a secularism charter in Quebec that may threaten our Canadian way of living, but this has led to some major travesties being overlooked.
Yes, I’m talking about the word “twerk” besmirching the hallowed Oxford Dictionaries Online.
There was a time when we took the English language more seriously. A glorious symbol of British power, it became the lingua-franca of the world after the English, valiantly refusing to learn any language other than their own, yelled it at the natives in their empire until it was understood.
This was the language of Shakespeare, Yeats, and Shelley, who lovingly moulded it into the vehicle of human expression in the written word.
Politicians yelled their sermons, lovers their proposals, crusaders their manifestos, and philosophers their theories, all in this great language.
Today we have sacrificed that glory at the altar of Miley Cyrus. Blurred the lines between the civil and the indecorous. Taken a wrecking ball to our linguistic identity.
Among the other words that were added to the online dictionary were “selfie,” “derp,” and “FOMO.” What an “omnishambles,” I say. Look it up.
I could see this coming. I grew up on the children’s books of Enid Blyton, respected author of such series as the “Famous Five” and the “Secret Seven,” parables about adventurous children who got into all sorts of adventures in the English countryside.
They ate their kippers and toast with excellent table manners, investigated wrongdoing in their communities, treated their friends well, and most definitely never considered anything as heinous as twerking.
Those were the days when the English language was used so beautifully as to even make English food sound like it is edible.
Today we have books with large type and even larger pictures. And our youth look not to Blyton and Shakespeare for linguistic inspiration, but to rappers who have condensed a whole philosophy of life into an abbreviation.
We must devote time and research into exploring the decline of the English language. We must stand strong against this challenge to refined speech.
