Dreams we gottem

Not surprised to hear this: 

For presidential hopefuls, simpler language resonates
Trump tops GOP field while talking to voters at fourth-grade level

I'm surprised by this, though: The article quotes Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor, which apparently "analyzes trends and language" as saying, “Good communication is good communication. . . . ‘I’ve got a Dream,’ all those great speeches are nice, and direct. They use words people understand. They give a big message, but they’re not grandiose.”

When I first came to the US, 30 years ago, almost no-one said "I've got [a thing]." They said, "I have [a thing]." It was diagnostic of British English versus American English. I've noticed "I've got" becoming more popular among American speakers over the years and it's now unremarkable. But, of course, Dr. King didn't say, "I've got a dream," he said "I have a dream," like a normal American of the time period. 

In fact, with a thing like a dream, which you "have" by imagining it, rather than by possessing it, "have" makes more sense than "got".  You'd certainly say "I had a dream last night" rather than "I had gotten a dream last night."  (Or "I had got a dream last night", since British English speakers don't conjugate "got".)

It's really strange to see an expert in communication translate such a famous line into a modern idiom so unconsciously. Either that, or he wasn't talking about Martin Luther King but referring to the song from Tangled (2010) which uses the modern phrase!

Speaking Birb

So a friend turned me on to an article that said, in part, that teen girls are the real driver of language change. Shakespeare, not so much. Teen girls are were it's at. They make the modifications to language.

It takes about a generation for the language patterns started among young women to jump over to men. Uptalk, for example, which is associated with Valley Girls in the 1970s, is found among young men today. In other words, women learn language from their peers; men learn it from their mothers.

The new language then misses a generation. The new words are passed on to the babies of the original girls.

So, I thought, if this is true, then Lolcat (2007) must have millions of young speakers. They learned it natively from 2007, making the youngest native speakers eight, and a large number of pidgin speakers between eight and fifteen. So what language are the teenage Lolcat speakers using?

It turns out the predictions are correct. Young people raised on Lolcat are modifying their native Lolcat speech and speaking Birb.  It's even less like English than Lolcat. I can speak Birb easily enough, since I follow @ProBirdRights but its corollary  Rate-my-reptile is a little tough to parse at first.

No problem. I can read it and sometimes write it. On the other hand, there are millions of people out there who purport to write English but don't know the difference between "lay" and "lie", which pisses me off a lot more.