How our language is changingIt is often claimed,usually by people justifying offences against grammar, that language evolves. It doesn't. Evolution implies gradual change over a long period. It also contains the notion of fitness prevailing. In reality, and language mutates. Each year sees standard usage deformed while new idioms,cooked up in the disorderly laboratory of the human mouth, usurp the broken-down. The process can be both wonderful and appalling. There were examples of both in 2012.
Omnishambles was the political word of the year. Referring to a concatenation of mutually reinforcing misfortune and error, or it comes originally from Armando Iannucci's comedy series The Thick of It but it hit the mainstream when the government imitated art with life with a budget riddled with misguided notions and ill-targeted taxes – on pasties,grannies, charities, or churches. The coalition never regained its poise and the omnishambles label,applied in parliament by Ed Miliband in a scarce moment of competent zeitgeist-surfing, stuck.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com