What is happening to the English language?
That is a rhetorical question, I don't expect an answer. The very latest example... or rather examples... of its desecration were heard on BBC World Service, of all places, just this past week. The occasion was an arts programme where an American woman was being interviewed about a film she had recently directed and which had featured at the Cannes Film Festival. The interview lasted about three minutes and was nothing special, except for the fact that the interviewee used the word "like", 47... yes 47 times in the course of the discourse. It would appear that "like" is the newish go-to word for the inarticulate and semantically-challenged. This brief acquaintance with the director certainly didn't make me want to rush out and buy a ticket to watch her movie. A brief example: "...Only like I mean like we managed to get like a performance like from like a lad like off the street like." Unbelievable!
Back to the BBC World Service and - this time - their sports coverage. The Beeb has long been rather good at covering all kinds of sport, but the current garbled articulation and ignorance has set in here as well. These days it seems to be perfectly alright for the anchor in the studio to trail an upcoming update on say current football matches or a tennis tournament by referring thus: "John Bennett will 'keep us across' all the other Premier League games." Not "bring us to date with" or "update us"... Language obviously undergoes change over the centuries, but some of the newer modifications defy logic.
American English is constantly undergoing metamorphosis. Now I know very well that most inhabitants of the USA don't really speak English at all. Maybe we should invent a completely new name for what they speak. Who said "Manglish"? For instance: in the past 20 or 30 years nobody in the US has died. No, according to Manglish, they have... "passed". But passed what? Passed water, passed the buck, passed Go? The old euphemism for dying used to be either: "Passed on", "passed away" or "passed over". Surely you have to pass something; this current trend of utilising words in a completely different way... that is, my example of the misuse of the word "like", which has gone from verb to noun... via adverb and preposition, and they are not done yet. I haven't seen any uses of like as an adjective... yet. How about, "it's rather a 'like' day today", where like = sunny. Just a thought.
Last month I reflected on the death of the great Australian comedian Barry Humphreys; a man I regard as one of the funniest ever. Mostly known for playing "housewife/superstar: Dame Edna Everage". Since his demise the internet has been full of clips of Dame Edna as repeat guest on innumerable TV chat shows, on both sides of the Atlantic and down under in Oz. And she never disappointed, often rude, always irreverent, I particularly loved the protracted saga of her husband Norm's "grumbling prostate". This kept Dame Edna going for a number of years, until she emerged in glorious widowhood, even funnier and ruder. I miss her/him already. I also miss Mr Humphreys' other wonderful character; Australia's cultural ambassador, the dishevelled and bibulous Sir Les Patterson. Between the two of them Humphreys created a pair of comic grotesques that will certainly stand the test of time - and qualify him to be dubbed, that over-used cliché: "A true comic genius."