Missing Those Eighties Transitions

I have good news. We have stopped watching the 1986 documentary, The Story of English. This might just be for the time being so I don't want to get too excited. But to fill that empty void, we are now watching The Adventure of English. Oh yes it is not longer a story, it is an adventure. This documentary is actually from the twenty first century, and though my heart aches at the lack of eighties musical transitions, I am glad we switched it up a bit. There is only so much Robert MacNeil a girl can handle.

Lets talk about Swift. No, I do not mean Taylor I mean Jonathan, her fifth cousin twice removed. Ok not really.Jonathan Swift was a writer that accepted the challenge of trying to harness English. He wanted to take control and take it away from the upper class as it prevent it from changing because of the slang used by them. Even though his plans kind of failed when Queen Anne died, Samuel Johnson was there to back him up. This guy spent seven years locking words into the only prison that was thought to harness them: a dictionary. He soon realized that nothing could stop English from being "decayed". So regarding these two, I have never thought English can be harnessed, it is always changing. Look at me, its not like I talk like these two men.

English crept into Scotland and started to replace Gaelic. Pronunciation was not leveled throughout the United Kingdom as well as the spelling, which had many variations. Then came Thomas Sheridan to teach everyone the proper way to speak English.There was an idea that English was supposed to be spoken as it was written but that was hard to accomplish. But have no fear! Robert Burns wrote poems in Scottish dialect and became a hero. He showed that their tongue was strong enough and to live on and there was no need to completely grip the idea of English. Another person who created this feeling of pride was William Wordsworth. He said there was no need for a deep poetic diction since poetry could be written in the mans common tongue. He was a bit of a rebel since he was showing that simple language could show the same ideas as fancy language.

Now it is the ladies turn. Jane Austen showed the ideas of courtship in her novels. She was as masterful and controlling as the men that had doubted her writing abilities. She wrote in a very proper way that used words such as  "agreeable", "appropriate", "discretion", and "propriety".By writing like this, she affected her readers. Polite terms were favored over simple words and therefore she affected a whole generation. 

With the change of thought cause by the Industrial Revolution, trade terms became very important. The machines themselves changed the meaning of certain words and showed how words like "train" or "steam" affected the English language. The people affected by this Revolution also added their own words into these times. There was a rhyming kind of slang used by the lower class.

The Adventure of English. Dir. Melvyn Bragg. Perf. Melvyn Bragg. ITV, 2003. Documentary.