Language Evolution - Should we oppose linguistic natural selection?

I was surfing around the web, as one does, and came across an article by Michael Erard, who has written a couple of times (that I know of anyway) for Wired Magazine ; firstly about the spread of the Chinese language (The Mandarin Offensive, issue 14:04) and then more recently contemplating the tranformative effect that English's success as a world language may have/is having on the languagse itself (How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand). Have a read, it's kind of interesting, I think.

And it set me wondering if this is a good thing or a bad thing - the evolution of language. And either way, since languages seem to just go ahead and change, regardless of the fuss such changes may cause, is what appears to be an academic question worth getting all hot and bothered about? I think the answer to my last question is - definitely - otherwise where's the fun? As for the first, hmmm, I don't know...yet...

I remember from the small amount of old English that I studied at university, followed by looking at Chaucer and Shakespeare that the more recent the writing, the easier it was to approach without translational footnotes. These linguistic changes seem to just happen and over time - what passed for 'plain English' moves through 'old-fashioned' to 'quaint' to 'belaboured' to 'pass me the Cliffs Notes' to 'where's the library?' to 'whoa what the hell is that?!'

This would seem to indictate that almost any language, particularly one as widely spoken as English, is going to be subject to huge change. I know that the French have (in the past if not recently,) kicked up a fuss about English words creeping into their language and that they did have (and may still have, for all I know) at least one society that was campaigning to have words like 'weekend' removed from their dictionaries for good. I remember that my Dad laughed about this and posited that the French lost a great chunk of their elevated vocabulary when they sliced off the heads of their aristocracy, and, through his guffaws, remarked that they could do with a few new words from somewhere.

I don't know if it's true but he may have a point - perhaps the French do need a few more words and decided to borrow from English. And why not? We have so many words that we have borrowed from other cultures - so at what point should we resist change? When does ignorance of say spelling and grammar (and yes, I know that mine isn't anywhere near perfect) stop being ignorance and simply become common usage? Is there ever a case where this trend is destructive to language and the culture it communicates?

Lynne Truss, the lady that wrote Eats, Shoots Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, "uses amphibology, a verbal fallacy arising from an ambiguous grammatical construction, and derived from a joke on bad punctuation as her title" [ps I didn't already know that this was the linguistic, technical term for it, I looked it up - on Wikipedia - that was a quote from Wikipedia and who knows, it may even be wrong! But anyhoo..]

The joke goes like so:

"A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

“Why?” asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
“Well, I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

Apparently Ms. Truss has had several of her own grammatical idiosyncrises (and even mistakes) held up to ridicule, parody and debate. That's not what I intend to do here but apparently you can find some here, here , here, here, here and here [on the popular blog, Language Log] as well as many many more all over the shop.

So yes, improper use of language can be funny, it can be misleading and I suppose there are instances where it could even be fatal. But I am inclined to venture that there is a delicate balance to be struck between observing the rules of the language games we play to facilitate the best possible quality of communication, and becoming so slavishly devoted to the rules that we care only for semantics etc. and nothing for what is being said. [And no, I don't think this is some inspired idea - I'm pretty sure it's common sense and hopefully you are too!]

When I'm not ranting 'Truss-stylie about using possessive singular apostophes to express plural nouns, I am genuinely thinking, "perhaps....maybe....is this is the way it should be done now?" Especially as such usage is so common (and in my experience I would say over 95% of CVs from the lowest paid to six figure salaries carry at least one and often all of the mistakes I talked about in my previous post,) then maybe the rules are just silly.

I don't know. I need more than an hour to think about it but the baby will wake up soon.

I'll think about it some more and edit this post then.

In the mean time, if anyone [including you, Paolo] has anything to add, please feel free to comment.