When did absolutely and 100% replace the word "yes" in the English language? It seems that people are trying to amplify even the simplicity of an affirmative. Do you like flowers? A mere yes no longer suffices. Do you like flowers? Absolutely! How about fake flowers? One-hundred percent! See what I mean?
When I was in college studying English as my major, I was taught that clarity was achieved through an "economy of words". In other parlance, make your point clearly with forceful simplicity. Layering modifiers tends to lessen the forcefulness, so keep those down. The example used was "I love you". Sweet. Simple. Meaningful. According to this one instructor, however, adding "very" to the mix lessened the message. "I love you very much" wasn't as impactful. (Not sure if I agreed with that, but it did give me something to think about back then. And I still think about it.
My favorite TV show is Big Bang Theory, now only in reruns. In one episode, Penny is talking to Leonard when she tells him she'll always have feelings for him, no matter what happens to their relationship. That convinces Leonard that she's going to break up with him because "always" makes things worse. "I'll have feelings for you", to him, was more positive than "I'll always have feelings for you."
I simply can't listen to any of the Kardashian sisters--or any of the Valley Girls--because they cannot speak without using the word "like" every fifth word. It's ingrained. I'm not sure it can, like, be beaten out of them if, like, their lives depended on it. You, like, get the picture.
If nothing else, our language is fluid. It changes over time in the same way that we do. Examples: In elementary school, we had spelling lists and tests over how to spell the words on the list each Friday. I was a lucky kids with a good visual memory. Once I saw a word, I usually could spell it (for the most part). There were some tricky ones, however. For instance, Halloween was spelled with an apostrophe between the two e's. Hallowe'en. On the test, if you left out the apostrophe, the word was counted wrong. Horrors! Not so now. (In fact, no one believes me on this one. Google it. It's there!) Also in those days, seasons of the year were capitalized. Nope. Not now. Words that ended in "f" in the singular were pluralized by changing the "f" to "v" and adding "es". Scarf became scarves. Dwarf became dwarves. Knife; knives. Hoof; hooves. Roof; rooves, etc. But wait, there's more! These days, many of those words have now been accepted without the changes, yet there seem to be no rules, rhyme, or reason to which is which. Scarf is now scarfs. Roof is now roofs; hoof is hoofs....but knife is still knives, and dwarf seems to be determined by whatever you are reading at the time. Ugh!
After college, I saved my three-inch thick handbook Perrin's Guide to English. For a long time, it was my go-to book to answer my questions about the mechanics of grammar. I threw it out a few years ago because so much of it no longer applies.
I can't keep up. It seems that it is no longer required to have a double space between typewritten sentences. Blasphemy!
My granddaughter uses terms I've never heard before: agism, ablism, cis gender. gender fluid...and so it goes. Things that were once cool, neat, or groovy are now sick, lit, or fire. Okay... Not a day goes by that I don't have to look something up to see what it means in today's usage.
Yes, I'm not a kid, but I'm not stupid, either. I actually try to stay current on important things if for no other reason than not to make a fool of myself. As a 40-year veteran English teacher, I spent an enormous amount of time harping on things like subject-verb agreement and pronoun-antecedent agreement. Now the newest generation comes along with its requests for pronouns. A single person may wish to be called "they". I do respect calling people what they want to be called, but so much goes against everything I ever learned/taught about pronouns, I usually have to beg for forgiveness when I slip up.
I am a Baby Boomer in the U.S. Apparently, "we" have a bad reputation for wanting things to stay the way they were in prehistoric times. That's not me. I'm a live-and-let-live person with a huge penchant for fairness. I try to roll with the punches--and all of those other cliche' things. I'm running in place as fast as I can. Does it matter? Absolutely! 100%!
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