A gentleman by the name of Barry Saunders, a columnist for the News and Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina, has written an obituary of the English language, and its demise was not from natural causes.
He knows who did English in: "Suspected of landing the mortal blow is the once-venerable Merriam-Webster Dictionary, abetted by the Internet and "words" – or, more accurately, an amalgam of made-up, mashed-together slang – such as photobomb, twerking, jegging, chillax, amazeballs and clickbait."
Mr. Saunders has got the wrong end of the stick. English would be as dead as Latin if it were not continuing to generate new words and new senses of old ones. Moreover, he appears to labor under a misapprehension that a dictionary functions like those no-shoes, no-shirt, no-service establishments and denies admittance to words that are not properly dressed. It eludes him that people turn to dictionaries to find the meanings and uses of words they do not know, and that newer words might well fall into that category.
His column amounts to one more installment in the long-running series Cranky Geezer Grouses About the Way the Young People Talk Nowadays.
Here's an exercise. Go to the Historical Dictionary of American Slang at alphaDictionary.com. It will let you search its trove by date. I plugged in the 1920s and found, among other specimens, boocoo, "much," presumably from beaucoup; dumb Dora, "stupid female"; fire extinguisher, "chaperone"; high-hat, "to snub someone"; Now you're on the trolley, "Now you've caught on"; and sheik, "sexy man." Had Mr. Saunders been writing in the Twenties, he would have found much to mark the impending death of the language.
He would also have found specimens of slang such as blind date, gigolo, killjoy, pull rank, slum (verb), and tearjerker, all of which came in as slang and decided to stay.
You can't tell from where you stand today where English will be tomorrow.
Mr. Saunders's obituary of English follows a very long tradition of discovering that the language is, if not dead, then moribund. Writing in The Economist in February, Robert Lane Greene quoted William Langland (d. 1386): "There is not a single modern schoolboy who can compose verses or write a decent letter." He goes on to cite Dryden, Swift, and Orwell, among others who have chronicled the steady decline of English over the past seven centuries.
Pace, Mr. Saunders, it's not dead yet.