Flexibility - at what cost?

Patrons of the English language pride themselves in the fact that English is a dynamic language - one that adapts to changes, to the passage of time, borrowing words from several languages and so on.

While this may be the reason for it having survived through the ages and being so popular, going much further than overtaking French as the world's most spoken language, but I feel that this borrowing words business crossed the label, 'far fetched' long ago. What remains to be called English today, seems to me, to be a fat dictionary full of borrowed words, and newly coined ones - neither of which adds to what I'd call beauty. The dictionary has gloated, devouring words from every other language, munching on any cheesy word or usage flinged at it by some random person, and used a couple of times on social media. As an Indian, I'm proud to see that several words from Indian languages have been gladly accepted by English, but even to a guy like me, this is going too far. Vocabulary sounds acceptable, but grammar itself appears transient.

It must be remembered that I speak, here, not as a hater of the language, but as a feeble lover of it (of course, I choose to write my articles in it) craving for its purity. On the pretext of being an accommodative tongue, English seems to have reduced itself into a whore, letting itself be tormented and tread on, by anyone who passes by it. It has been defiled so badly that it is almost impossible to identify a fixed point in time before which the language was pure. Sometimes I find myself reading a classic like Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, just to taste some good English - I'd add Harry Potter to that list too, but books with good English are hard to find these days.

With several 'cool' words being introduced into the language, especially to articulate untellable stages (or types? the description sounds disgusting), redundancy has become rampant in English, pushing it to the point of implications of common words changing drastically. The corruption that plagues young (and old, I guess) minds today reflects in the language too - the paradigm shift that has attacked life itself is reflected in language. Innocence has almost been destroyed - this doesn't mean people know things today - things that they didn't know - I mean that they interpret things differently now. And I would name the language infiltration as one of the causes for this - or at least an effect of it.. Or both.

To substantiate my stance, I will pick an example from this very domain.. Or, rather, a slightly different one. Well, I'll let you decide. I bring in the topic of sex. A simple act of procreation has become the talk of the town, bringing bedrooms to the streets, with people cutting sorry figures, caught between proudly brandishing their carnal desires on one side and being afraid of being thrashed by someone - or the media on the other. That aside, I brought in this topic to showcase what I consider the best example of corrupting innocence. The primary change that took place is the corruption of the term 'love' - a word that implied, well, something different, implies sex when 'made'. Some of these implicit changes can carve permanent images - or rather, forge connections in the brain. After all those talks about mind maps and the like, I'm sure you will have no difficulty in admitting this possibility. Similar words including bed, sleeping, affair, fondling, stroking and many more innocent looking (and, in fact, innocent) words have lewd pseudo-homonyms that come to one's memory so often that many often replace these with relatively less misunderstandable terms. And then there's a class of pathetically misleading words like masturdating (implying a person who goes to a movie or for dinner alone) - honestly, is such a word necessary? Sounds more like a good opportunity to call even singles by choice as losers.

Moving on to other examples, the number of times the word 'like' is accepted in a colloquial sentence tends to infinity, the word 'random' is permissible in any random context and can be used as a random adjective for any random person, punctuation (especially capitalization) is a forgotten concept, 'awesome' is an awesome word that gets awesommer with every 's' and 'm' added, reaching the pinnacle of awesomeness at awesummax, (thankfully, many of these developments haven't crept into written English yet) - and, of course, the internet lingo that stuns language-lovers into oblivion.

Is English going to the dogs? Perhaps that'd be better fate than where it's headed now..