Looking through Geoffrey Nunberg's the way we talk now, I noticed the chapter titled Hell in a Handcar. He says, ...the signs seem unmistakable that the language is in a bad way. He isn't talking about things like the loss of correct usage of in behalf of vs. on behalf of. ...people seem to have lost their grip even on the simple things, like when to write its without an apostrophe. ...
And yet something has been changing over the years. It isn't that people are writing worse but that they're writing more, and spreading it about more widely. It's the effect that Jacques Barzun described fifty years ago as the endless multiplication of dufferism. On a per capita basis, we aren't producing many more novels or histories than we were in the eighteenth century. But there has been a huge growth in sectors like popular magazines, government pamphlets, press releases, and user manuals--most of them written by people who would not have been putting pen to paper in the age of Johnson.
And of course the internet has multiplied this a googol-load; I believe that the more we see poor writing the more likely we are to replicate it.
What do you all think?
I apologize for any mistakes in copying.
