«After my daughter was born, I’d considered buying a shotgun to ward off potential suitors fourteen or so years up the road. Now, as I listened to these girls babble and imagined Gabby one day talking with the same banality and ignorance of the English language, I thought of buying the same shotgun to blow my own fucking head off.
Five thousand years of civilization, more or less, twenty-three hundred years since the libraries of Alexandria, over a hundred years since the invention of flight, wafer-thin computers at our fingertips, which can access the intellectual riches of the globe, and judging by the girls in that room, the only advance we’d made since the invention of fire was turning like into an omni-word, useful as a verb, a noun, an article, the whole sentence if need be» (p. 124).
«There is a worrying trend of adults mimicking teen-speak. They are using slang words and ignoring grammar. […] Their language is deteriorating. They are lowering the bar. Our language is flying off at all tangents, without the anchor of a solid foundation» (Marie Clair, Plain English Campaign, 2019).
«Le nivellement par le bas atteint tous les secteurs de la vie quotidienne, de la richesse du langage aux capacités de concentration. Que le coupable s’appelle Q.I., informatique, école, ou tout cela à la fois, le constat justifiait amplement tout un dossier. Dépérissement de la langue, perte de la syntaxe, abandon de la culture générale : notre espèce redescend la pente du progrès intellectuel. Darwin, au secours !»
Source : Causeur, 71, 2019, dossier «Le niveau baisse ! Bienvenue dans l’âge bête.»