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Puttin’ on the style by Dominic Green | The New Criterion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Written English is at what the euphemists would call an inflection point. The nineteenth-century ideal of a democratic mass culture is a bizarre historical dream. The twentieth-century empire of “Mid-Cult” is gone. The departments of English got the theoretical barbarians for whom they were waiting. Standards of literacy are declining, even though the tests are getting easier. Knowledge of a foreign language, even Spanish, is rare among those without immigrant parents. Young Americans, like Romans among the British tribes, struggle to understand the language of their servants.
As always, I'm glad to hear that the sky is falling. Yet the young I know seem much more polyglot than I and my friends were in our teens and twenties. Even making allowances for the biased sample--kids from private schools, ESL instructors--I think that the college-educated young are better at languages than we were.
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