LINGUISTIC
DRIFT LINGUISTIC
DRIFT
Up until a few short decades ago, here in the U.S., the standard terms for ladies’ casual garments were as follows: the dual-leg item reaching down to the ankles was referred to as either slacks or trousers, the underwear beneath it was known as pants, and the word panties was reserved for the lacy, semi-transparent, come-hither type of undergarment.
However, in recent years and the most recent generations, the word pants has found itself ambiguously substituted for slacks, and even the lowliest monotonous cotton underwear ends up privileged with the fancier term panties.
This is but one example of a much larger phenomenon, of course, and such linguistic drift irritates me to no end; I utterly refuse to follow it. Thus I was delightedly entertained by an anecdote that I recently read in a letter-to-the-editor of a magazine. The young lady who wrote, either a teenager or in her early twenties, had gone to England on vacation. Her first error was a practical one: she actually seated herself upon a park bench without first checking to see whether it was clean. Upon rising, she discovered her mistake, that she had indeed sat in something gooey and unpleasant. Whereupon, she committed her second error: she loudly announced for all to hear, “I got crap on my pants!” Dozens of onlookers, most of them British, stared at her in abject horror, that she would announce such a personal embarrassment in public. For one thing, she was unaware that she had referred to her underwear. For another, let us remember what the term crap literally means, and then you’ll see the problem. From her letter, it seems that she eventually came to understand her mistake, but only partially. With clear wide-eyed innocence, owing to her youth, she adorably explained that the British use their terms differently from the way that Americans do (in the way that I referred to in my first paragraph). However, even by the end of her letter, she remained ignorant of the fact that it was not the British who are “different,” or who have drifted away from the original terminology, but rather the most recent Americans. Standard American-English, as I demonstrated above, is the same as British-English in regard to these terms, and this fact still remained completely unknown to her.
I laughed heartily at the vivid vindication of my position: that linguistic drift causes trouble, misunderstanding, and at times humiliation. The purpose of language, any language, is to communicate, and to do so as clearly as possible. The purpose of linguistic drift, it seems, is to miscommunicate. Ergo, it is at best useless, and at worst highly detrimental.
Perhaps the various American generations should not be so eager to embrace such pointless slippage in terms.
