Is internet English debasing the language? Not IMHO

The internet might be a historic boon for kitten-fanciers and steaming-eared trolls, but it's not all good news. Online writing, you see, is destroying the purity of English as we know it and threatening to dumb us all down into a herd of screen-jabbing illiterates. Or so runs one regular technophobic complaint, the latest version of which has been offered by Robert McCrum. He is worried about what he describes as "the abuse and impoverishment of English online (notably, in blogs and emails)" and what he perceives as "the overall crassness of English prose in the age of global communications". The remedy, as so often for such linguo-pessimists, is George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language".

Source: Is internet English debasing the language? Not IMHO | Steven Poole | Books | guardian.co.uk

---

Rights to all content (text, images, videos etc.) with post source. If you think these are wrongly attributed email us