Term Papers on Acronyms, Idioms And Slang: The Evolution Of The English Language.

Term Paper Title	Acronyms, Idioms And Slang: The Evolution Of The English Language.
# of Words	1146
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.58

Acronyms, Idioms and Slang: the Evolution of the English Language.

     Although the English language is only 1500 years old, it has evolved at
an incredible rate: so much so, that, at first glance, the average person in
America today would find most Shakespearean literature confusing without the aid
of an Old-English dictionary or Cliff's Notes. Yet Shakespear lived just 300
years ago! Some are seeing this is a sign of the decline of the English
language, that people are becoming less and less literate. As R. Walker writes
in his essay "Why English Needs Protecting," "the moral and economic decline of
Great Britain in the post-war era has been mirrored by a decline in the English
language and literature." I, however, disagree. It seems to me that the point of
language is to communicate — to express some idea or exchange some form of
information with someone else. In this sense, the English language seems, not
necessarily to be  improving or decaying, but optimizing — becoming more
efficient.
     It has been both said and observed that the technological evolution of a
society tends to grow exponentially rather than linearly. The same can also be
said of the English language. English is evolving on two levels: culturally and
technologically. And both of these are unavoidable. Perhaps the more noticeable
of the two today is the technological evolution of English. When the current
scope of a given language is insufficient to describe a new concept, invention,
or property, then there becomes a necessity to alter, combine, or create words
to provide a needed definition. For example, the field of Astro-Physics has
provided the English language with such new terms as pulsar, quasar, quark,
black hole, photon, neutrino, positron etc. Similarly, our society has recently
be inundated with a myriad of new terms from the field of Computer Science:
motherboard, hard drive, Internet, megabyte, CD, IDE, SCSI, TCP/IP, WWW, HTTP,
DMA, GUI and literally hundreds of others acronyms this particular field is
notorious for. While some of these terms, such as black hole and hard drive,
are just a combination of pre-existing words, many of them are new words
altogether. To me it seems clear that anything that serves to increase the
academic vocabulary of a society should be welcomed, although not all would
agree. For example, many have accused this trend of creating an acronym for
everything to be impersonal and confusing. And, while I agree that there is
really no need to abbreviate Kentucky Fried Chicken, it does become tiring to
have to constantly say Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or Transfer Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) when they are both used so frequently when
dealing with computers on a network. Not only is it futile for one to reject
these inevitably new additions to our language, one would do oneself well to
actually learn them.
     The cultural evolution of English is not as distinguishable, nor
seemingly as necessary, as the technological evolution of English, yet it exists
nonetheless. It is on this level that the English language has primarily been
accused of being in a state of decline, specifically by the incorporation of
"slang" into mainstream language. But Webster's Dictionary defines slang as:

     1: language peculiar to a particular group: as a: ARGOT b:
     JARGON 2: an informal nonstandard vocabulary composed
     typically of coinages, arbitrarily changed words, and
     extravagant, forced, or facetious figures of speech.

In this sense, much of what is commonly thought to be proper English can be said
to be slang. When the U.S. declared its independen...

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