The LSD cults have brought with it a profusion of new head- "acidhead," "psychedelic," etc.įlexner further explains how the language has changed from the 50s and 60s, affecting our speech and vocabulary patterns. "Sit-in" and "swim-in" are recent products of the civil rights movement "teach -in" a product of the campaign against the Vietnam war "be-in" and "love-in" products of the hippie subculture. Thus, for example, words like "fast-back," "wash-and-wear" or "flashcube" were all propelled into language by advertising in recent years. Alvin Toffler gives us these examples: Some new words come directly from the world of consumer products and technology. The dropping and adding of words in the language is being replaced three times faster. The turnover in the language has more or less occurred in the last fifty years alone. If language during Shakespeare had at least 200,000, these have dropped out and replaced in the four centuries then. If our images of reality are changing more rapidly, and the gadgets of image-transmission are being speeded up, and a parallel change is altering the very codes we use. This mode of communication is quickly being challenged by the new and emerging media and merging relationships. Unless this is done, communication is impossible." Chomsky believes that a linguistic theory should deal only with an "ideal" speaker and listener, who knows his language perfectly and never makes any mistakes,never departs from grammatical propriety. The receiver must make sense of the message, disentangle it from the noise, reconstruct it in its original, non-random form. It conveys messages, to be sure, but the messages are distorted by "noise" in the form of mistakes, slips of the tongue, memory lapses, repetitions and distractions.
At the surface, in the form of speech, the message is very often untidy, imperfect, and full of errors. But as a message moves from the source in the brain on its journey to the person for whom it is intended, the message becomes distorted in various ways. The input to the channel between speaker and listener is "coded" by grammar which is regular and reliable. The point of view of its relationship with all other messages which could have been sent but were not. For a theory of language in the full sense of the word can be said is of more interest than what is actually said, and every speaker can say infinitely much. Chomsky wanted to discover "those basic relationships which hold in general." According to him, "What person says is an unreliable guide to what that person actually knows, often unconsciously, and it is knowledge of the patterns of language in the full sense of the word. Noam Chomsky sought for tacit principles in the hidden mental operations which undergird human language. The modern revolution of in linguistics, which began in the 1950s, discovered at the same time that the genetic code, was an attempt to investigate the universal principles of all languages using a similar route, delving down beneath the observable surface of spoken sentences to the hidden abstract structures underlying the. Were Shakespeare suddenly to materialize in London or New York today, he would be able to understand, on average, only five out of every nine words in our vocabulary. This seems to be true not only of English, but French, Russian and Japanese as well-off the estimated 450,000 "usable" words in the English Language today, only perhaps 250,000 would be comprehensible to William Shakespeare. The rapidity with which words come and go is vastly accelerated.
Flexner: "The words, we use are changing faster today - not merely on the slang level, but on every level.
Speechlessness and Modern Internet Language-Loaded and Bloated Cyber CommunityĪccording to the Random House Dictionary's senior editor, Stuart B.