|| Bonding with so called 'Intellectuals' ||CC#11 IO - Page 22

What's happening to ordinary English? Like, it's gross!

Remember the cheesy 1970 cliche, Love means never having to say you're sorry'? It was spoken in a spirit quite the opposite of John Wayne's 1949 line, Never apologise, never explain'. Now, being with it' means never having to say I'm sorry'; it has been replaced by My bad'. This is a weird mutant apology which has nuked an adjective and turned it into a noun. It showed up in my Inbox just yesterday from no less than a fine American author who's coming for our Times litfest this December. My bad' has gunned down all other phrases of the forgiveness-asking genre. You could call it the new maafia'.

But i guess it had to happen " as a corollary of the inane, insane, and equally intriguing I'm good'. Move over, MJ. He made an anthem of the grammatically kosher I'm bad', but for several years now, I'm good' is the standard response to a whole range of queries from How are you?' to Want another drink/dosa/dandiya dance?' It's so everywhere that you'd think the whole world has been indoctrinated by the morality brigade, signed up for a course on self-elevation, or undergone auto-suggestion therapy to cure nasty thoughts about its neighbour, his wife and his five-year-old daughter.

It's scary. These two conditioned responses have become a pandemic of verbola'. I'm good' has infected all species of queries; My bad' has wiped out whole populations of apologising phrases.

Traditionally, I'm good' was a self-righteous statement pronounced by those who definitely were not. Gropers in godmen's robes, tearers-down of Finding Fanny posters, missionary positionists on Art 377, and jihadists against girl-boy love and the very idea of India. Logically, too, it's not for you to tell me you're good'. That's a conclusion to be arrived at by me, or other unbiased party.

My bad' didn't even have a life in an age when adjectives were mere dependents, and hadn't begun usurping the status of nouns to which they owed their very existence. These days, like anyone cares.

Ah, yes, in this semantic upheaval, Like' too has shed its past associations with bonding or appreciation. In fact it has lost meaning altogether, and is used as if it were a mere verbal comma before the next clause.

Facebook maintains like' in its conventional meaning, but has taken it to a whole new level. Next up could well be unlike', not in its conventional form of contrast, but as accomplice to that other FB atrocity, unfriend'.

But, horror, i might have to swallow my snobbery about the illiterate liberties taken by GenNet. Earlier this year, a New York Times article, By The Book, But The Book Is Evolving', profusely quoted Michael Proffitt, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, to show how much of this new' verbal promiscuity is in fact quite hoary.

It agreed that purists cringe at like' when it is plopped into sentences', and becomes a rest stop for the hesitant, and not just tweens'. But Proffitt dug out a line from Evelina, by the English novelist and diarist, Frances Burney: Father grew quite uneasy, like, for fear of his Lordship's taking offence.' Its date? 1778.

Unfriend' is even less new. Facebook may have arrived in 2004, but in 1659, English historian Thomas Fuller wrote in Appeal of Injured Innocence: I Hope, Sir, that we are not mutually Un-friended by this Difference which hath happened betwixt us.'

Some semantic sleuth is sure to sniff out earlier usage of I'm good'. When that happens, i'll have to blush and say an abject, My bad'.

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Alec Smart said: "India says, Hi, MOM!' at first shot. Leaves rest of the planet red-faced. "