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But why should become extinct change to go extinct at the dictate of fashion? On Radio 4 last week someone read out a little bit of a book by Bill Bryson. ‘For all the trouble they take to assemble and preserve themselves, species crumple and die remarkably routinely,’ he had written. ‘And the more complex they get, the more quickly they appear to go extinct.’ Mr Bryson is a careful user of language, but he is from America after all, and going extinct has been going great guns there for years.
Last week too, the Prime Minister made the statement on Sudan that perhaps we had been waiting for. In any case, what he said was: ‘This moment is testament to the leaders in both North and South Sudan.’ What did he mean ‘testament’? It’s not the New Testament and it’s not the last will and testament of Sudan. I commented in 2005 on this weird new usage, in place of testimony, and remarked on it more irritably in 2009, and now it has burrowed into our organs of speech so that it pops out whenever a suitable cliché is requested from a politician or his speechwriters.
If we so easily adopt a piece of vocabulary or syntax from hearing it a few times, does it mean that we will soon start to use pronunciations that annoy us at present when weather-forecasters say wast for west or girls in coffee shops say kest for kissed? The vowels are shifting round, and I fear we shall shift with them too one day.
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