… some factors do show long-term directional influences. An obvious one is ease of use: people won’t bother saying “omnibus” when “bus” will do, or “environment” when their friends are getting away with “emviromment”.
…
Children forming their initial mental model of how English works don’t want to believe it’s a mess of random idioms; any regularities they notice (like “past tenses end in -ED”) are extended by analogy as far as their peers will let them (“bended”). All these consistent “trends” in language change make prediction more feasible, or at any rate, less obviously hopeless.
Part of the joy and pleasure of English is its boundless creativity: I can describe a new machine as bicyclish, I can say that I’m vitamining myself to stave off a cold, I can complain that someone is the smilingest person I’ve ever seen, and I can decide, out of the blue, that fetch is now the word I want to use to mean “cool.” By the same token, readers and listeners can decide to adopt or ignore any of these uses or forms.
In a brief flurry of self-aggrandisement, I’d like to point out that I’m in the habit of collecting author blog posts which contain advice on writing, and then publishing them in big batches on my own blog, Velcro City Tourist Board.
Here’s a heads-up for Futurismic regulars who don’t just like reading genre fiction, but who also like reading writing about genre fiction, and who would be interested in reading writing written about writing about genre fiction*…
A message arrived in the Futurismic inbox from Shira Lipkin, a regular contributor in our Friday roundups. Says Shira:
I’m doing a blogathon this Saturday, July 26 – posting to my LiveJournal every half hour for 24 hours to raise money for the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. This is my sixth year blogathonning, and I write spontaneous short fiction every year. It usually tends to have an urban fantasy bent (as in fantasy in a city, not paranormal romance), but this year, I’m taking a distinctly SF angle on it. For 24 hours, I’ll be in character as a xenoarchaeologist, trying to make sense of precollapse Earth… with the help of over 50 artists who donated “artifacts” to this project, including a few SF/F authors themselves. All artifacts are being auctioned, with a story card.
I feel my leg being pulled, but The Avocado Papers is selling nonexclusive rights to canned opening paragraphs for $1.75 a word. The shortest is $122.50, pricey enough to motivate even the most blocked novelist to warm up with a few word-association exercises. The grafs they’ve posted are just OK, IMO. A better deal: The tireless Mur Lafferty offers a daily blog of ideas from Poughkeepsie under Creative Commons attribution. They’re strange, wonderful, and free.
An interesting look at the changes in language over time – and a science-fictional look at what languages of the future might be like in 1000 years time:
Here’s a heads-up for Futurismic regulars who don’t just like reading genre fiction, but who also like reading writing about genre fiction, and who would be interested in reading writing written about writing about genre fiction*…
I feel my leg being pulled, but