(HOST) Commentator Nancy Nahra has been noticing a significant shift in the way young people use our American English language.
(NAHRA) To find out what is happening in our world, I like to listen. Lately I’ve heard strange talk. . .
At a bookstore, “I should have wroten it down.” On a cell phone,”I didn’t know his face since we’d never spoke in person,” and in a restaurant, “It was so hot, they could have drank four glasses.”
If you learned grammar at your school, then you know what was wrong and what would have been correct, no problem. But let’s push it. Why this pattern? Why now?
I think our language, American English, is cracking a little around the edges in a predictable way: it’s losing the words that it needs less than it used to.
We now have less need for forms like “have written” and “have spoken” because people talk in a new way that avoids the past and holds the present. You’ve heard it, not just from kids or even college students, but from adults who should and maybe do know better. In the new idiom they might say, “I’m like ‘wait a minute, no way am I using that elevator,'” instead of, “I was reluctant and afraid to use it.”
What a difference. You did just notice something different, but did you notice how big the shift was? Role playing is bumping reporting. That’s what you just heard.
Instead of accepting the job of telling my experience and asking you to listen, I do something else. I suggest a mood and invite you to re-live being me at the moment. Don’t listen and reflect – just pretend it’s here and now. That’s big: no more speaker and listener, no more then and now. It’s always only now and we’re taking turns being on stage.
We’re moving from using language the way a reporter did – back when people read newspapers – to using the language of script writers. We’re playing hard – and we’re knocking the edges off something that belongs to everyone, our American English.
Nancy Nahra is Professor of Humanities at Champlain College.