martinimade

"The graybeard sensibilities of the style mavens come not just from an underappreciation of the fact that language change but from a lack of reflection on their own psychology. As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline -- the illusion of the good old days. And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it...

... Complaints about the decline of language go at least as far back as the invention of the printing press. Soon after William Caxton set up the first on in England in 1478, he lamented, 'And certaynly our language now vsed veryeth ferre from what whiche was vsed and poken when I was borne.'"

-- Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style