I read an interesting article here. It is about the oldest words in language and how language evolves. The article, for the most part, is complete bunk, but I became fixated on one part of the piece: Words that are evolving rapidly, and likely to disappear. According to Mark Pagel, a researcher, the following words fall into this category:
Dirty, squeeze, bad, because, guts, push (verb), smell (verb), stab, stick (noun), turn (verb), wipe.
His rationale is that these already differ greatly between related languages, such as English and German, and are good candidates to evolve into new forms. I think the man just randomly picked a group of words that he heard parents say on a daily basis and branded them as such. Well, ok, so maybe not stab and guts - that he got from playing Call of Duty too many times.
I'll throw out that it is the advent of texting that is creating a whole new language and means of communication. "Because" evolves to "cause" evolves to "cuz"? I offer this link of texting abbreviations as some flimsy evidence for my theory (which I am sure is not new or enlightening). I only have a few committed to memory and figure I will never learn to be an extensive texter. Really, when am I ever going to need to know how to text EMRTW (Evil Monkeys Rule The World). Speaking of, I am going phone shopping this week. Since they no longer make a car charger for my phone, I gather my phone is obsolete. I lag behind the technological times.
I have a friend who teaches communications on the college level. She recently posted that she has students who actually answer questions on papers, exams, etc. with texting abbreviations. Clearly, we are regressing. Sad.
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