PING: TITLE: Post It #20 | tail -f carlo.log BLOG NAME: [...] languages. English is degrading each and every day, says Glass Maze’s lapsed cannibal in a amusing, yet angry [...] PING: TITLE: Language « Insert Title Here [...] Language Filed under: Humor — Jared @ 9:08 am I just want to say that, in terms of it’s humor, language on the internet is a funny thing. [...]

But words like these bug me because they’re ugly and inelegant and unnecessary and they sound horrible. Why do this stuff to the language if you don’t have to?

For example: at some point in our history some English nobleman got tired of telling his other nobleman buddies about all of the peasants he was throwing out of windows — because there was no word for throwing people out of windows, and it was a pain in the ass saying “threw the peasant out the window” over and over again. He’d have to say: “Yeah, this peasant came to me today with this long boring story about how he and his family were starving or something because I kept taking all their food, so I threw him out the window.” Or: “My god I’m bored. You know what I need? Some throwing-peasants-out-of-windows. Jeeves! Fetch me some peasants!” Too many damn syllables.

So he invented the word “defenestrate”, stealing fenetre from French, mutating it, and then adding suffixes and prefixes as necessary. I have no problem with that. It sounds pretty good, and it fills a void.

That’s how to grow a language.

PS for the kiddies: Throwing people out of windows is wrong.

I’m not saying that this particular example is pretty, but language changes gradually over time. What would ye olde English poets think about our current language stylings? The sheer lack of the letter ‘u’ would likely cause conniptions, but we seem to get by just fine.

Either that or I forgot to take my curmudgeon pills this morning. ;)