Is the general standard of English declining?
Or has there 'never been a time when English was not thought to be going to hell in a handcart'? Complaints about English are (a) as old as the hills, (b) based on no linguistic logic, and (c) ultimately futile, since no one can stop language from varying and changing. In The Language Wars , Henry Hitchings argues there has never been a time when English was not thought to be going to hell in a handcart. He cites what sounds like a contemporary essay on "the growing illiteracy of American boys" and invites us to guess when it was written. The answer turns out to be, in 1896 – and the boys whose illiteracy so alarmed the essay's author were not hillbillies or slum children, but Harvard undergraduates. Source But aren't young people today reading far less? Is the Internet destroying our 'book culture'? Adam Gopnik summarises the different approaches to this question: Never-Better : The internet is opening up a new information democracy. Everyone