Acronyms, Idioms And Slang: The Evolution Of The English Language. :: essays research papers

Acronyms, Idioms and Slang the Evolution of the position Language.     Although the English linguistic communication is solo 1500 years old, it has evolved atan incredible rate so much so, that, at first glance, the average person inAmerica today would have most Shakespe bean literature confusing without the aidof an Old-English dictionary or Cliffs Notes. Yet Shakespear lived just 300years ago Some argon seeing this is a sign of the decline of the Englishlanguage, that people are becoming less and less literate. As R. Walker writesin his move "Why English Needs Protecting," "the moral and economic decline of expectant Britain in the post-war era has been mirrored by a decline in the Englishlanguage and literature." I, however, disagree. It seems to me that the point oflanguage is to communicate to express virtually idea or exchange some form ofinformation with soul else. In this sense, the English language seems, notnecessarily to be imp roving or decaying, but optimizing becoming to a greater extentefficient.     It has been both said and sight that the technological evolution of asociety tends to grow exponentially kind of than linearly. The same can also besaid of the English language. English is evolving on two levels culturally andtechnologically. And both of these are unavoidable. Perhaps the more noticeableof the two today is the technological evolution of English. When the current chain of a given language is insufficient to describe a impertinent concept, invention,or property, then there becomes a necessity to alter, combine, or give rise wordsto provide a wishinged definition. For example, the field of Astro-Physics hasprovided the English language with much(prenominal) pertly terms as pulsar, quasar, quark,black hole, photon, neutrino, positron etcetera Similarly, our society has recentlybe inundated with a myriad of new terms from the field of Computer Sciencemotherboard, ha rd drive, meshing, megabyte, CD, IDE, SCSI, TCP/IP, WWW, HTTP,DMA, graphical user interface and literally hundreds of others acronyms this particular field isnotorious for. While some of these terms, such as black hole and hard drive,are just a combination of pre-existing words, many of them are new wordsaltogether. To me it seems fix that anything that serves to increase theacademic vocabulary of a society should be welcomed, although not all wouldagree. For example, many have accused this trend of creating an acronym foreverything to be impersonal and confusing. And, while I agree that there isreally no need to abbreviate Kentucky Fried Chicken, it does become tiring tohave to constantly judge Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or Transfer ControlProtocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) when they are both used so frequently when